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{"url":"https:\/\/earthcubed.wordpress.com\/2009\/09\/12\/coriolis-forces-in-hopkins-and-simmons-vorticity-equation\/","text":"# Earth Cubed\n\n## Coriolis Forces in Hopkins and Simmons Vorticity\u00a0Equation\n\nIn the thread vector operations in Hopkins and Simmons, I compute the components of the curl as:\n\n$\\left[ \\nabla \\times \\vec A \\right]_{\\sigma}= \\frac{1}{r\\mu}\\frac{\\partial A_{\\lambda}}{\\partial \\mu}+ \\frac{RT}{\\sigma m g}\\frac{\\partial A_{\\mu}}{\\partial \\lambda}=\\left[ \\nabla \\times \\vec A \\right]_{\\sigma,\\mu}+\\left[ \\nabla \\times \\vec A \\right]_{\\sigma,\\lambda}$\n\n$\\left[ \\nabla \\times \\vec A \\right]_{\\mu}= -\\frac{RT}{\\sigma m g}\\frac{\\partial A_{\\sigma}}{\\partial \\lambda}- \\frac{\\sqrt{1-\\mu^2}}{r} \\frac{\\partial A_{\\lambda}}{\\partial \\sigma}=\\left[ \\nabla \\times \\vec A \\right]_{\\mu,\\lambda}+\\left[ \\nabla \\times \\vec A \\right]_{\\mu,\\sigma}$\n\n$\\left[ \\nabla \\times \\vec A \\right]_{\\lambda}= \\frac{\\sqrt{1-\\mu^2}RT}{r}\\frac{\\partial A_{\\mu}}{\\partial \\sigma}-\\frac{RT}{r\\mu} \\frac{\\partial A_{\\sigma}}{\\partial \\mu}=\\left[ \\nabla \\times \\vec A \\right]_{\\lambda,\\sigma}+\\left[ \\nabla \\times \\vec A \\right]_{\\lambda,\\mu}$\n\nIn my post Coriolis forces in Hopkins and Simmons I compute the coriolis force as:\n\n$\\boldsymbol{\\Omega \\times v} = \\begin{pmatrix} \\mu U \\\\ \\pm \\sqrt{1-\\mu^2} U \\\\ \\mp \\sqrt{1-\\mu^2} V - \\mu W \\end{pmatrix} \\ = \\begin{pmatrix} A_{\\sigma} \\\\ A_{\\mu} \\\\ A_{\\lambda} \\end{pmatrix} \\$\n\nAnd the partial derivatives are given by:\n\n$\\frac{\\partial A_{\\lambda}}{\\partial \\mu}=\\frac{\\partial}{\\partial \\mu}\\left(\\mp \\sqrt{1-\\mu^2} V - \\mu W\\right)=\\pm \\frac{2\\mu}{\\sqrt{1-\\mu^2}}V \\mp \\sqrt{1-\\mu^2} \\frac{\\partial V}{\\partial \\mu} - W-\\frac{\\partial W}{\\partial \\mu}$\n\n$\\frac{\\partial A_{\\mu}}{\\partial \\lambda}=\\frac{\\partial }{\\partial \\lambda}\\left(\\pm \\sqrt{1-\\mu^2} U\\right)=\\pm \\sqrt{1-\\mu^2} \\frac{\\partial U}{\\partial \\lambda}$\n\n$\\frac{\\partial A_{\\sigma}}{\\partial \\lambda}=\\frac{\\partial }{\\partial \\lambda}\\left( \\mu U \\right)=\\mu \\frac{\\partial U}{\\partial \\lambda}$\n\n$\\frac{\\partial A_{\\lambda}}{\\partial \\sigma}=\\frac{\\partial}{\\partial \\sigma}\\left(\\mp \\sqrt{1-\\mu^2} V - \\mu W\\right)=\\mp \\sqrt{1-\\mu^2} \\frac{\\partial V}{\\partial \\sigma} - \\mu \\frac{\\partial W}{\\partial \\sigma}$\n\n$\\frac{\\partial A_{\\mu}}{\\partial \\sigma}=\\frac{\\partial }{\\partial \\sigma}\\left(\\pm \\sqrt{1-\\mu^2} U\\right)=\\pm \\sqrt{1-\\mu^2} \\frac{\\partial U }{\\partial \\sigma}$\n\n$\\frac{\\partial A_{\\sigma}}{\\partial \\mu}=\\frac{\\partial }{\\partial \\mu}\\left( \\mu U \\right)=\\mu \\frac{\\partial U}{\\partial \\mu}$\n\nI\u2019ll derive the rest of this later but this doesn\u2019t seem to be the form of the prognostic equation used by Hopkins and Simmons.\n\nDivergence Free Flow\n\nIn the post Vector Operations in Hopkins and Simmons I derived the divergence operator as follows:\n\n$\\nabla \\cdot = \\frac{1}{h_{\\mu}} \\frac{\\partial }{\\partial \\mu} + \\frac{1}{h_{\\lambda}}\\frac{\\partial}{\\partial \\lambda}+\\frac{1}{h_{\\sigma}}\\frac{\\partial}{\\partial \\sigma}=\\frac{1-\\mu^2}{r} \\frac{\\partial}{\\partial \\mu} + \\frac{1}{r \\mu}\\frac{\\partial}{\\partial \\lambda}-\\frac{RT}{\\sigma mg}\\frac{\\partial}{\\partial \\sigma}$\n\nIf the divergence of the velocity equals zero then:\n\n$\\nabla \\cdot \\begin{pmatrix} W \\\\ V \\\\ U \\end{pmatrix}\\ =\\frac{1-\\mu^2}{r} \\frac{\\partial V}{\\partial \\mu} + \\frac{1}{r \\mu}\\frac{\\partial U}{\\partial \\lambda}-\\frac{RT}{\\sigma mg}\\frac{\\partial W}{\\partial \\sigma}=0$\n\nWhich implies:\n\n$\\frac{\\partial W}{\\partial \\sigma}=\\frac{(1-\\mu^2)\\sigma mg}{r RT} \\frac{\\partial V}{\\partial \\mu} + \\frac{\\sigma mg}{r \\mu \\sigma mg}\\frac{\\partial U}{\\partial \\lambda}$","date":"2017-12-12 06:13:17","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 13, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.9257659912109375, \"perplexity\": 1369.7716647438772}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2017-51\/segments\/1512948515309.5\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20171212060515-20171212080515-00087.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
{"url":"https:\/\/mpm.spbstu.ru\/en\/article\/2018.59.11\/","text":"# The nonlinear model of the librational dynamics of the paraffin crystal\n\nAuthors:\nAbstract:\n\nIn our work we consider the librational dynamics of the chains in paraffin crystals. We consider the paraffin chains being completely rigid and only inter-chain potential is taken into account. To study the possible change in the dynamics with the increase of the temperature, i.e. when the system achieves the vicinity of the rotation phase transition we consider the model without restrictions on the amplitudes of the rotational angles. The nonlinear spectra of the system are studied.","date":"2023-03-30 07:59:49","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": false, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.8033081889152527, \"perplexity\": 487.47738096253994}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 20, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2023-14\/segments\/1679296949107.48\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20230330070451-20230330100451-00368.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Zinaida Alexandrovna Kuprijanovič, poklicno znana tudi kot Zina Kuprijanovič ali Zena (stilizirana kot ZENA), beloruska pevka, igralka in televizijska voditeljica, *17. september 2002.
Kariera
Zena je svojo glasbeno kariero začela kot otroška pevka leta 2013, ko je nastopila na več pevskih tekmovanjih za otroke.
Zena se je dvakrat potegovala za predstavnico Belorusije na Mladinski pesmi Evrovizije, in sicer leta 2015, ko je s pesmijo »Mir« zasedla četrto mesto, ter leta 2016, ko je s pesmijo »Kosmos« zasedla tretje mesto. Leta 2018 je Zena skupaj z Evgenyjem Perlinom in Heleno Meraai vodila Mladinsko pesem Evrovizije 2018. Zena je med drugim posodila glas za rusko sinhronizacijo lika Moane v istoimenskem animiranem filmu.
Pesem Evrovizije
Leta 2019 je bila Zena predstavnica Belorusije na tekmovanju za Pesem Evrovizije 2019 s pesmijo »Like It«. Nastopila je v prvem polfinalu in se kot 10. uvrščena s 122 točkami uvrstila v finale. V finalu se je s 31 točkami uvrstila na 24. mesto med 26 državami. Bila je zadnja predstavnica Belorusije na Pesmi Evrovizije, ker je bilo tekmovanje 2020 odpovedano, leta 2021 pa je bila Belorusija diskvalificirana s tekmovanja in ji bilo prepovedana udeležba na prihodnjih tekmovanjih.
Diskografija
EP
»На грани« (2016)
Pesmi
»Mir« (2015)
»Kosmos« (2016)
»Like It« (2019)
»Гроза и Муза« (2021)
»LADIES« (skupaj s Freddy Red, 2021)
»На грани« (2021)
»Slightly« (2021)
»Каравелла« (2021)
Sklici
Beloruski pevci
Evrovizijski glasbeniki | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
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For special formatting, div and span elements are used. You need to add styles in css for proper formatting or looks and feel. The difference between <div> and <span> is <div> is displayed as a block and <span> is displayed as inline text.
The <div>quick brown</div> fox jumps over the lazy dog.
The <span>quick brown</span> fox jumps over the lazy dog. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
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package com.lab.service.impl;
import java.util.List;
import com.lab.dao.RecordDAO;
import com.lab.dao.TerminalDAO;
import com.lab.dao.impl.RecordImpl;
import com.lab.dao.impl.TerminalImpl;
import com.lab.po.Classroom;
import com.lab.po.Record;
import com.lab.service.RecordService;
import com.lab.struct.DBFiled;
import com.lab.util.DateAdapter;
public class RecordServiceImpl implements RecordService {
//数据DAO
RecordDAO dao = new RecordImpl();
@Override
public Record getByID(int id) {
if (id >= DBFiled.Record.ID_MIN && id <= DBFiled.Record.ID_MAX) {
try {
return dao.getByID(id);
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
return null;
}
@Override
public List<Record> getAll() {
try {
return dao.getAll();
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return null;
}
@Override
public List<Record> getRange(int start, int end) {
try {
if (start >= DBFiled.Record.ID_MIN && start <= DBFiled.Record.ID_MAX &&
end >= DBFiled.Record.ID_MIN && end <= DBFiled.Record.ID_MAX &&
start <= end) {
return dao.getRange(start, end);
}
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return null;
}
@Override
public List<Classroom> getBy(String labName,long start, long end){
try {
if (!DBFiled.Record.CHECKTIME(start) || !DBFiled.Record.CHECKTIME(end)) {
return null;
}
if (labName == null) {
return dao.getBy(start, end);
}else {
return dao.getBy(labName,start,end);
}
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return null;
}
@Override
public boolean add(Record record) {
try {
if (this.isVaild(record) && DBFiled.Record.ADDRANGE(record)) {
return dao.add(record);
}
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return false;
}
@Override
public boolean delete(Record record) {
try {
if (this.isVaild(record) && DBFiled.Record.RANGE(record)) {
return dao.delete(record);
}
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return false;
}
@Override
public boolean update(Record record) {
try {
if (this.isVaild(record) && DBFiled.Record.RANGE(record)) {
return dao.update(record);
}
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return false;
}
private boolean isVaild(Record record) {
if (record == null || record.getMacAddr() == null || record.getMacAddr().trim().isEmpty() ||
record.getStatus() == null || record.getStatus().trim().isEmpty()) {
return false;
}
TerminalDAO dao = new TerminalImpl();
if (dao.getByMacAddr(record.getMacAddr().trim()) == null) {
return false;
}
return true;
}
/**
* main test
* @param args
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
Record record = new Record();
RecordServiceImpl rec = new RecordServiceImpl();
record.setMacAddr("A2:B5:32:F4:A1:B8");
record.setStatus("00000000");
record.setDateTimeMS(DateAdapter.getTimeInMillis());
if (rec.add(record)) {
System.out.print(true);
}
rec.getBy("A501", DateAdapter.getTimeInMillis(-1), DateAdapter.getTimeInMillis() );
}
}
| {
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{"url":"https:\/\/www.degruyter.com\/document\/doi\/10.1515\/cmam-2022-0036\/html","text":"# Anisotropic Adaptive Finite Elements for an Elliptic Problem with Strongly Varying Diffusion Coefficient\n\nSamuel Dubuis, Paride Passelli and Marco Picasso\n\n# Abstract\n\nThe elliptic problem - div ( \u03bc u ) = f is considered, where \u03bc > 0 is smooth but strongly varying. Anisotropic a posteriori error estimates are derived, the effectivity index being bounded above and below by two constants independent of the data \ud835\udc53, \ud835\udf07, the mesh size and aspect ratio, up to higher order terms. Numerical experiments on non-adapted and adapted anisotropic meshes confirm these predictions.\n\nMSC 2010: 65N30; 65N50\n\n## 1 Introduction\n\nAdaptive meshes have proved to be very efficient for solving PDEs at reduced computational cost given a prescribed level of accuracy. In the framework of finite elements methods, the adaptive criteria is often based on a posteriori error estimates, which were first derived for isotropic meshes [9, 38, 31, 16, 36, 7, 1] and more recently for anisotropic meshes [23, 30, 39, 26, 15, 20, 21, 19, 34, 33, 27, 11, 10], that is to say meshes with large aspect ratio. Anisotropic finite elements have demonstrated their efficiency when boundary or internal layers are involved, for instance in computational fluid dynamics [3, 4].\n\nHere we focus on the elliptic problem - div ( \u03bc u ) = f , where \u03bc > 0 is smooth but strongly varying. We will derive anisotropic a posteriori error estimates and show that the effectivity index (the ratio between the estimated error and the true error) is bounded above and below by two constants independent of the data \ud835\udc53, \ud835\udf07, the mesh size and aspect ratio, up to higher order terms. These theoretical findings will be confirmed when using adapted meshes with large aspect ratio.\n\nThe outline of the paper is the following. In Section 2, we present the model equation and the numerical method. In Section 3, the anisotropic setting is introduced. In Section 4, we introduce the error estimator and state Theorem 1 which shows the equivalence between the true and the estimated error. In Section 5, numerical experiments with non-adapted meshes are performed. In Section 6, an adaptive algorithm is introduced, and its efficiency is demonstrated in both 2D and 3D situations. Finally, in Appendix A, the proof of Theorem 1 is presented.\n\n## 2 Problem Statement and Numerical Method\n\nWe consider a polygonal domain \u03a9 R 2 and a function u : \u03a9 R that is the solution of the elliptic equation\n\n(2.1) { - div ( \u03bc u ) = f in \u03a9 , u = 0 on \u03a9 .\n\nThroughout this paper, it is assumed that f L 2 ( \u03a9 ) and \u03bc L ( \u03a9 ) such that there exist \u03bc min , \u03bc max such that\n\n0 < \u03bc min \u03bc ( x ) \u03bc max , a.e. x \u03a9 .\n\nUnder these assumptions, there exists a unique weak solution u H 0 1 ( \u03a9 ) of (2.1). Moreover, if \u03bc W 1 , ( \u03a9 ) and \u03a9 is convex, then u H 2 ( \u03a9 ) ; see [22].\n\nFor any h > 0 , let T h be a conformal triangulation of \u03a9 into triangles \ud835\udc3e of diameter h K h . Let V h be the usual finite element space of continuous, piecewise linear, functions on triangles of T h , with zero value on \u03a9 . To approximate the solution of (2.1), we are looking for u h V h such that\n\n(2.2) \u03a9 \u03bc u h v h = \u03a9 f v h for all v h V h .\n\nWe will introduce an error estimator K T h \u03b7 K 2 equivalent to the numerical error u - u h , that is to say there exist two constants C ^ 1 , C ^ 2 > 0 that are independent of the data \ud835\udf07, \ud835\udc53, the mesh size and aspect ratio such that\n\n(2.3) C ^ 1 \u03a9 \u03bc | ( u - u h ) | 2 K T h \u03b7 K 2 C ^ 2 \u03a9 \u03bc | ( u - u h ) | 2\n\nup to higher order terms. It is important to note that (i) (2.3) can be proved provided some local error term is equidistributed in the direction of maximum and minimum stretching \u2013 see assumption (4.2) hereafter \u2013 which is one of the goals of our adaptive algorithm; (ii) the error estimator \u03b7 K involves the exact solution, but post-processing techniques can be used to obtain an accurate approximation; (iii) the notion of higher order terms will be addressed more precisely in Remark 2.\n\n## 3 Anisotropic Estimates for Cl\u00e9ment\u2019s Interpolant\n\nIn the standard finite element theory, interpolation estimates involve constants that may depend on the aspect ratio and thus yield a posteriori error estimates that are not useful when using anisotropic finite elements. Recently, interpolation estimates that are sharp for meshes with large aspect ratio have been derived. We briefly recall the theoretical framework developed in [20, 21, 29]; similar results can be found in [23]. It should be noted that the maximum angle condition discussed in [6, 5] is not required; see [20, Section 2.1] for details. For simplicity, the presentation is done in a two-dimensional framework; it can easily be extended to the three dimensions.\n\nFor any K T h , we denote by T K : K ^ K one of the affine transformations mapping the reference triangle K ^ into \ud835\udc3e defined by x = T K ( x ^ ) = M K x ^ + t K , where M K R 2 \u00d7 2 and t K R 2 . Since M K is invertible, it admits a singular value decomposition M K = R K T \u039b K P K , where R K and P K are orthogonal matrices and\n\n\u039b K = ( \u03bb 1 , K 0 0 \u03bb 2 , K ) , \u03bb 1 , K \u03bb 2 , K > 0 , R K = ( r 1 , K T r 2 , K T ) .\n\nIn the above notation, r 1 , K , r 2 , K are the unit vectors corresponding to the directions of maximum and minimum stretching, respectively, and \u03bb 1 , K , \u03bb 2 , K correspond to the amplitude of the maximum and minimum stretching. A geometrical interpretation is shown in Figure 1. Note that, since T K is not uniquely defined, then neither \u03bb i , K , r i , K , i = 1 , 2 , are.\n\n### Figure 1\n\nTransformation T K mapping the usual reference element K ^ into a right triangle \ud835\udc3e. The reference triangle is stretched in the direction r 1 , K = ( 1 , 0 ) T (resp. r 2 , K = ( 0 , 1 ) T ), with amplitude \u03bb 1 , K (resp. \u03bb 2 , K ).\n\nOur goal is to derive residual-based, anisotropic a posteriori error estimates, the key ingredient being Cl\u00e9ment\u2019s interpolant [14]. When using anisotropic meshes, some additional geometrical assumptions must be made in order to ensure that the constants involved in the interpolation estimates will not depend on the mesh aspect ratio. From now, it is assumed that\n\n1. for each \ud835\udc3e, the cardinality of \u0394 K , that is the union of triangles sharing a vertex with \ud835\udc3e, is uniformly bounded from above, independently of the mesh geometry,\n\n2. for each \ud835\udc3e, the diameter of \u0394 K ^ = T K - 1 ( \u0394 K ) is uniformly bounded from above, independently of the mesh geometry.\n\nIn particular, the second assumption excludes too distorted meshes; see for instance [29]. It guarantees that all the quantities vary smoothly in the neighborhood of every triangle \ud835\udc3e. In practice, these assumptions are fulfilled when using available anisotropic mesh generators; see Section 6.\n\nLet R h : H 1 ( \u03a9 ) V h be the Cl\u00e9ment interpolant. Under the two above assumptions, the following interpolation error estimate can be proved.\n\nProposition 1\n\n## Proposition 1 (Anisotropic Cl\u00e9ment Interpolation Error Estimate [20, 21, 29, 34])\n\nThere exists a constant C ^ > 0 depending only on the reference triangle K ^ , in particular independent of the mesh size and aspect ratio, such that, for any v H 1 ( \u03a9 ) , for any K T h ,\n\n(3.1) v - R h ( v ) L 2 ( K ) C ^ \u03c9 K ( v ) ,\n\nand for any edge l i , i = 1 , 2 , 3 , of \ud835\udc3e,\n\n(3.2) v - R h ( v ) L 2 ( l i ) C ^ ( | l i | \u03bb 1 , K \u03bb 2 , K ) 1 \/ 2 \u03c9 K ( v ) ,\n\nwhere\n\n(3.3) \u03c9 K 2 ( v ) = \u03bb 1 , K 2 v r 1 , K L 2 ( \u0394 K ) 2 + \u03bb 2 , K 2 v r 2 , K L 2 ( \u0394 K ) 2 = \u03bb 1 , K 2 ( r 1 , K T G K ( v ) r 1 , K ) + \u03bb 2 , K 2 ( r 2 , K T G K ( v ) r 2 , K ) ,\n\nwith\n\nG K ( v ) = ( \u0394 K ( v x 1 ) 2 \u0394 K v x 1 v x 2 \u0394 K v x 1 v x 2 \u0394 K ( v x 2 ) 2 ) .\n\n## 4 The Anisotropic Error Estimator\n\nWe now introduce the error estimator. It is an improvement of the one presented in [34], adapted to the case of a non-constant diffusion coefficient \ud835\udf07. Letting f L 2 ( \u03a9 ) , for all K T h , we define the L 2 ( \u03a9 ) projection of \ud835\udc53 onto the set of constant functions by\n\n\u03a0 K f = 1 | K | K f .\n\nFor a vector-valued function f = ( f 1 , f 2 ) , we denote \u03a0 K f = : ( \u03a0 K f 1 , \u03a0 K f 2 ) , and for any edge l i , i = 1 , 2 , 3 , of \ud835\udc3e, we define\n\n\u03a0 l i f = 1 | l i | l i f .\n\nWe then define the local error estimator \u03b7 K 2 by\n\n(4.1) \u03b7 K 2 = ( \u03a0 K f + \u03a0 K \u03bc u h L 2 ( K ) + 1 2 i = 1 3 ( | l i | \u03bb 1 , K \u03bb 2 , K ) 1 \/ 2 [ \u03a0 l i \u03bc u h n ] L 2 ( l i ) ) \u03c9 K ( u - u h ) .\n\nHere \ud835\udc8f stands for the unit outer normal to \ud835\udc3e, and \u03c9 K is given by (3.3). For any edge l i , i = 1 , 2 , 3 , of \ud835\udc3e, we denote by [ ] the jump across the edge l i .\n\nObserve that error estimator (4.1) is not standard since it involves the exact solution in the term \u03c9 K ( u - u h ) and thus is not fully computable. However, in practice, post-processing techniques can be applied in order to approximate the quantity G K ( u - u h ) , contained in \u03c9 K ( u - u h ) , for instance Zienkiewicz\u2013Zhu (ZZ) post-processing [40, 2, 41]. More precisely, we will replace\n\n( u - u h ) x i by \u03a0 h ZZ u h x i - u h x i , i = 1 , 2 ,\n\nwhere, for any v h V h , for any vertex \ud835\udc43 of the mesh,\n\n\u03a0 h ZZ v h x i ( P ) = K T h , P K | K | v h | K x i K T h , P K | K |\n\nis an approximate L 2 ( \u03a9 ) projection of v h x i onto V h .\n\nIt is well known [41, 13] that, for elliptic equations and structured meshes, superconvergence of the ZZ recovery occurs, implying that the post-processing is asymptotically exact, that is to say\n\nlim h 0 \u03a0 h ZZ u h - u h L 2 ( \u03a9 ) u - u h L 2 ( \u03a9 ) = 1 .\n\nOn general meshes, it was first proven that \u03a0 h ZZ u h - u h L 2 ( \u03a9 ) and the true error u - u h L 2 ( \u03a9 ) are equivalent; see for instance [24]. More recently, the superconvergence of the ZZ gradient recovery was finally shown for unstructured anisotropic meshes [12]. In general, the accuracy of the ZZ post-processing is better than the theoretical predictions, even on anisotropic meshes. We refer for instance to the numerical results presented in [18, 33, 34, 32, 27, 35, 11, 28] in the case of anisotropic meshes for elliptic, parabolic and hyperbolic equations.\n\nUnder extra assumptions on \ud835\udc53, \ud835\udf07 and the mesh, it is possible to prove that the error estimator is equivalent to the true numerical error u - u h , up to some higher order terms. The result is stated in the next theorem, whose proof is presented in Appendix A.\n\nTheorem 1\n\nAssume that f L 2 ( \u03a9 ) and \u03bc W 1 , ( \u03a9 ) ; let u H 0 1 ( \u03a9 ) be the weak solution of (2.1), and let u h V h be the solution of (2.2). Moreover, assume that there exists C ^ > 0 depending only on the reference triangle K ^ such that, for all K T h ,\n\n(4.2) \u03bb 1 , K 2 ( r 1 , K T G K ( u - u h ) r 1 , K ) C ^ \u03bb 2 , K 2 ( r 2 , K T G K ( u - u h ) r 2 , K ) .\n\nThen there exists a constant C ^ 1 > 0 depending only on the reference triangle such that\n\n\u03a9 \u03bc | ( u - u h ) | 2 C ^ 1 K T h ( \u03b7 K 2 + \u03b5 K 2 \u03bc min ) ,\n\nwhere\n\n\u03b5 K 2 = \u03bb 2 , K 2 ( f - \u03a0 K f L 2 ( K ) 2 + ( \u03bc - \u03a0 K \u03bc ) u h L 2 ( K ) 2 + 1 \u03bb 2 , K i = 1 3 [ ( \u03bc - \u03a0 l i \u03bc ) u h n ] L 2 ( l i ) 2 ) .\n\nMoreover, there exists a constant C ^ 2 > 0 depending only on the reference triangle K ^ such that\n\nK T h \u03b7 K 2 C ^ 2 K T h ( K \u03bc | ( u - u h ) | 2 ( 1 + \u03bc - \u03a0 K \u03bc L ( \u0394 K ) \u03bc min ) + \u03b5 K 2 \u03bc min ) .\n\nRemark 1\n\nAssumption (4.2) means that the error in the maximal stretching direction is smaller than or equal to the error in the minimal stretching direction. This assumption was already used in [34] to derive the equivalence between the numerical error and the estimator. One possibility to fulfill (4.2) is to equidistribute for all K T h the error in each direction r 1 , K , r 2 , K ,\n\n(4.3) \u03bb 1 , K 2 ( r 1 , K T G K ( u - u h ) r 1 , K ) = \u03bb 2 , K 2 ( r 2 , K T G K ( u - u h ) r 2 , K ) .\n\nThis requirement corresponds to the matching assumption discussed in [23]. Building a mesh such that (4.3) is satisfied will be ensured by the adaptive algorithm presented in Section 6. The algorithm has also the goal to align directions r 1 , K , r 2 , K with respect to the eigenvectors of G K ( u - u h ) .\n\nRemark 2\n\nAssume f H 1 ( \u03a9 ) and \u03bc W 2 , ( \u03a9 ) . Then, from [20, 21], we have\n\nf - \u03a0 K f L 2 ( K ) 2 C ^ i = 1 2 \u03bb i , K 2 f r i , K L 2 ( K ) 2 .\n\nSimilarly, we have\n\n( \u03bc - \u03a0 K \u03bc ) u h L 2 ( K ) 2 C ^ ( i , j = 1 2 \u03bb i , K \u03bb j , K \u03bb 2 , K r i , K T H ( \u03bc ) r j , K L ( K ) ) 2 u h L 2 ( K ) 2 ,\n\nwhere H ( ) denotes the Hessian matrix,\n\ni = 1 3 [ ( \u03bc - \u03a0 l i \u03bc ) u h n ] L 2 ( l i ) 2 C ^ ( i = 1 2 \u03bb i , K 2 \u03bc r i , K L ( K ) 2 ) u h n L 2 ( K ) 2 , \u03bc - \u03a0 K \u03bc L ( K ) C ^ ( \u03bb 1 , K \u03bc r 1 , K L ( K ) + \u03bb 2 , K \u03bc r 2 , K L ( K ) ) .\n\nIn the isotropic framework, this yields a contribution\n\nK T h \u03b5 K 2 = O ( h 3 ) , which is negligible compared to \u03a9 \u03bc | ( u - u h ) | 2 = O ( h 2 ) .\n\nIn the anisotropic setting, for instance if \ud835\udc53 and \ud835\udf07 depend only on x 2 and r 1 , K = ( 1 , 0 ) , then \u03b5 K 2 = O ( \u03bb 2 , K 3 ) . Thus, in both cases, Theorem 1 indeed yields (2.3) up to higher order terms.\n\n## 5 Numerical Experiments with Non-adapted Meshes\n\nThe goal of this section is to numerically verify the equivalence between the true error and the error estimator derived in Section 4. To this end, we consider problems with a known exact solution, and we define the following quantities: the error in H 1 seminorm\n\ne H 1 = ( u - u h ) L 2 ( \u03a9 ) ,\n\nthe error in the weighted H 1 seminorm\n\ne \u03bc , H 1 = \u03bc 1 \/ 2 ( u - u h ) L 2 ( \u03a9 ) ,\n\nthe anisotropic estimator\n\n\u03b7 A = ( K T h \u03b7 K 2 ) 1 \/ 2 ,\n\nthe anisotropic effectivity index\n\nei A = \u03b7 A e \u03bc , H 1 ,\n\nand the ZZ effectivity index\n\nei ZZ = u h - \u03a0 h ZZ u h L 2 ( \u03a9 ) e H 1 .\n\nThese quantities should satisfy the following properties:\n\n\u2022 ei A independent of the solution \ud835\udc62,\n\n\u2022 ei A independent of the variations of \ud835\udf07 and of the ratio \u03bc max \u03bc min ,\n\n\u2022 ei A independent of the mesh size and aspect ratio,\n\n\u2022 ei ZZ close to one.\n\nFor all x R , \u03f5 > 0 , let\n\nH \u03f5 ( x ) = { 0 x - \u03f5 , x + \u03f5 2 \u03f5 + 1 2 \u03c0 sin ( \u03c0 x \u03f5 ) - \u03f5 x \u03f5 , 1 \u03f5 x ,\n\nbe a smoothing of the classical Heavyside function. We consider problem (2.1) in the unit square \u03a9 = ( 0 , 1 ) 2 and choose \ud835\udc53 so that \ud835\udc62 is given by\n\n(5.1) u ( x ) = \u03bc 2 sin ( \u03c0 x 1 ) sin ( \u03c0 x 2 ) H \u03f5 ( x 1 - 0.5 ) + \u03bc 1 sin ( \u03c0 x 1 ) sin ( \u03c0 x 2 ) H \u03f5 ( 0.5 - x 1 ) .\n\nand \ud835\udf07 is given by\n\n(5.2) \u03bc ( x ) = \u03bc 2 H \u03f5 ( x 1 - 0.5 ) + \u03bc 1 ( 1 - H \u03f5 ( x 1 - 0.5 ) ) ,\n\nwith \u03bc 1 , \u03bc 2 > 0 . Thus \ud835\udf07 is constant except in a thin boundary layer of width \ud835\udf16 where a strong gradient can be observed. The results are reported in Table 1 with unstructured non-adapted meshes of various size, where h 1 and h 2 denote the mesh size in direction x 1 and x 2 , respectively; see Figure 2. We observe that the error estimator is equivalent to the true error uniformly in the mesh size, the mesh aspect ratio and the ratio \u03bc max \u03bc min . Moreover, the values of ei ZZ show that the Zienkiewicz\u2013Zhu error estimator is asymptotically exact.\n\n### Figure 2\n\nExample of non-adapted mesh with h 1 = 0.05 and h 2 = 0.5 .\n\n### Table 1\n\nTrue error, estimated error and effectivity index for various non-adapted meshes and various choices of \u03bc 1 , \u03bc 2 and \ud835\udf16, when \ud835\udc62 and \ud835\udf07 are given by (5.1) and (5.2).\n\nh 1 - h 2 \u03b7 A e \u03bc , H 1 e i A \u03b7 ZZ e H 1 e i ZZ\n\u03bc 1 = 1 , \u03bc 2 = 2 , \u03f5 = 0.1\n\n0.05-0.5 9.33 3.25 2.87 1.98 2.54 0.78\n0.025-0.25 6.73 2.15 3.13 1.49 1.64 0.91\n0.0125-0.125 3.96 1.38 2.87 0.99 1.05 0.95\n0.00625-0.0625 2.10 0.73 2.87 0.53 0.55 0.97\n0.003125-0.03125 1.07 0.36 2.93 0.27 0.28 0.98\n0.0015625-0.015625 0.54 0.19 2.93 0.14 0.14 0.98\n0.00078125-0.0078125 0.27 0.095 2.89 0.07 0.07 0.98\n\n\u03bc 1 = 1 , \u03bc 2 = 2 , \u03f5 = 0.01\n\n0.05-0.5 91.07 36.24 2.51 20.67 29.83 0.69\n0.025-0.25 63.39 23.47 2.70 14.44 19.72 0.73\n0.0125-0.125 14.20 6.62 2.15 3.50 5.36 0.65\n0.00625-0.0625 6.74 2.20 3.07 2.03 1.77 1.15\n0.003125-0.03125 3.27 0.99 3.29 0.87 0.81 1.07\n0.0015625-0.015625 1.67 0.51 3.28 0.42 0.42 1.02\n0.00078125-0.0078125 0.85 0.26 3.30 0.21 0.21 1.00\n\n\u03bc 1 = 1 , \u03bc 2 = 100 , \u03f5 = 0.1\n\n0.05-0.5 3584.94 1077.18 3.33 123.56 135.07 0.91\n0.025-0.25 2395.20 764.94 3.13 85.30 89.35 0.95\n0.0125-0.125 1365.70 469.50 2.91 50.27 52.43 0.95\n0.00625-0.0625 715.23 246.22 2.90 26.23 26.89 0.98\n0.003125-0.03125 359.39 120.49 2.98 12.94 13.13 0.99\n0.0015625-0.015625 182.26 61.13 2.98 6.54 6.63 0.99\n0.00078125-0.0078125 92.05 31.22 2.95 3.32 3.37 0.99\n\n\u03bc 1 = 1 , \u03bc 2 = 100 , \u03f5 = 0.01\n\n0.005-0.05 3258.10 1183.14 2.75 162.95 183.48 0.89\n0.0025-0.025 1517.05 450.98 3.36 66.70 65.89 1.01\n0.00125-0.0125 777.60 231.73 3.36 32.19 32.01 1.01\n0.000625-0.00625 375.00 110.71 3.39 15.60 15.61 1.00\n0.0006-0.006 360.27 106.08 3.40 14.87 14.90 1.00\n\nWe present an adaptive algorithm similar to the one presented in [33, 34]. For the sake of simplicity, we present the two-dimensional version of the algorithm, which can be easily extended to the three-dimensional case.\n\nIn all numerical experiments described hereafter, we observe that the anisotropic effectivity index converges to a number close to 3.45 as \u210e goes to zero. In order to keep the effectivity index close to one, we will divide \u03b7 K by 3.45. To keep the notation simple, we still write \u03b7 K instead of \u03b7 K \/ 3.45 in the sequel.\n\nThe goal of the adaptive algorithm is to build a sequence of meshes with possibly large aspect ratio such that the relative estimated error is close to a prescribed tolerance TOL, i.e.\n\n(6.1) 0.75 TOL ( K T h \u03b7 K 2 \u03a9 \u03bc ( x ) | u h | 2 d x ) 1 \/ 2 1.25 TOL .\n\nWe use the mesh generator BL2D [25] which requires information at the vertices rather than at the triangles. We define the error indicator for each vertex \ud835\udc43 as\n\n\u03b7 P 2 = K T h P K \u03b7 K 2 so that P T h \u03b7 P 2 = 3 K T h \u03b7 K 2 ,\n\nand (6.1) can be replaced by\n\n0.75 TOL ( P T h \u03b7 P 2 3 \u03a9 \u03bc ( x ) | u h | 2 d x ) 1 \/ 2 1.25 TOL .\n\nWe then equidistribute \u03b7 P 2 on each vertex \ud835\udc43 by adjusting the mesh with the objective to satisfy\n\n3 N v 0.75 2 TOL 2 \u03a9 \u03bc ( x ) | u h | 2 d x \u03b7 P 2 3 N v 1.25 2 TOL 2 \u03a9 \u03bc ( x ) | u h | 2 d x ,\n\nwhere N v is the number of vertices of T h . In order to satisfy (4.2), we want to equidistribute the error in the directions of minimum and maximum stretchings, and therefore modify the mesh with the goal to satisfy, for i = 1 , 2 ,\n\n(6.2) 3 \u03c3 P 2 N v 0.75 2 TOL 2 \u03a9 \u03bc ( x ) | u h | 2 d x K T h P K \u03b7 i , K 2 3 \u03c3 P 2 N v 1.25 2 TOL 2 \u03a9 \u03bc ( x ) | u h | 2 d x ,\n\nwhere\n\n\u03b7 i , K 2 = ( \u03a0 K f + \u03a0 K \u03bc u h L 2 ( K ) + 1 2 j = 1 3 ( | l j | \u03bb 1 , K \u03bb 2 , K ) 1 \/ 2 [ \u03a0 l j \u03bc ( x ) u h n ] L 2 ( l j ) ) \u03bb i , K 2 r i , K T G K ( u - u h ) r i , K\n\nand\n\n\u03c3 P = K T h , P K ( \u03b7 1 , K 2 + \u03b7 2 , K 2 ) K T h , P K ( \u03b7 1 , K 4 + \u03b7 2 , K 4 ) 1 \/ 2 ,\n\nwhich satisfies 1 2 \u03c3 P 1 .\n\nThe mesh generator BL2D requires for each vertex \ud835\udc43 the local mesh sizes h 1 , P , h 2 , P and the angle \u03b8 P between the direction of maximum stretching and the horizontal axis. We align the directions of maximum and minimum stretching with the eigenvectors of the post-processed gradient\n\nG P = K T h P K G K ( u - u h ) .\n\nMore precisely, we set \u03b8 P as the angle between the horizontal axis and the eigenvector corresponding to the largest eigenvalue of G P . Concerning the local mesh sizes h 1 , P , h 2 , P , values \u03bb i , P , i = 1 , 2 , are computed at the vertices\n\n\u03bb i , P = K T h , P K \u03bb i , K K T h , P K 1 .\n\nThen, if the two inequalities in (6.2) are satisfied, we set h i , P = \u03bb i , P ; if the left inequality in (6.2) is not satisfied, we set h i , P = 1.5 \u03bb i , P ; if the right inequality is not satisfied, we set h i , P = \u03bb i , P \/ 1.5 . Starting from an initial coarse mesh and a coarse value of TOL, a sequence of 40 adapted meshes is generated. Then TOL is divided by two, 40 adapted meshes are generated, and so on. The results are reported hereafter.\n\n### Table 2\n\nTrue error, effectivity indices and aspect ratio for different values of the tolerance TOL, when \ud835\udc62 and \ud835\udf07 are given by (6.3) and (5.2), with \u03bc 1 = 1 , \u03bc 2 = 2 and \u03f5 = 0.01 .\n\nTOL Vertices ei A e H 1 e i ZZ ar max ar av CPU tot CPU adapt\n0.1 119 0.89 0.43 1.01 1679 355 7 6\n0.05 196 0.94 0.22 0.99 3971 769 12 10\n0.025 355 0.92 0.11 1.00 6643 1693 17 15\n0.0125 741 0.96 0.054 1.00 17847 3055 25 21\n0.00625 1388 0.99 0.027 1.00 37973 6683 36 31\n0.003125 2822 0.98 0.013 1.00 77257 13292 55 47\n\n### Figure 3\n\nSolution on adapted mesh when TOL = 0.025 , when \ud835\udc62 and \ud835\udf07 are given by (6.3) and (5.2), with \u03bc 1 = 1 , \u03bc 2 = 2 and \u03f5 = 0.01 .\n\n### Figure 4\n\nIn blue: number of conjugate gradient iterations needed to reach a tolerance 10 - 8 for each iteration of the adaptive algorithm. In red: number of vertices of each adapted mesh at each iteration of the adaptive algorithm. The tolerance TOL is halved every 40 iterations of the adaptive algorithm.\n\nConsider again problem (2.1) in the unit square \u03a9 = ( 0 , 1 ) 2 , with exact solution\n\n(6.3) u ( x ) = \u03bc 2 sin ( \u03c0 x 1 ) H \u03f5 ( x 1 - 0.5 ) + \u03bc 1 sin ( \u03c0 x 1 ) H \u03f5 ( 0.5 - x 1 )\n\nWe then present a 3D numerical experiment, the adaptive algorithm and the error estimator described above being adapted to the 3D case; see [17] for details. In order to produce adapted meshes, the 3D Precise Mesh software is used [42]. Letting \u03a9 = ( 0 , 1 ) \u00d7 ( 0 , 1 ) \u00d7 ( 0 , 0.1 ) , we choose \ud835\udc53 such that \ud835\udf07 is given by\n\n(6.4) \u03bc ( x ) = \u03bc 2 H \u03f5 ( x 3 - 0.05 ) + \u03bc 1 ( 1 - H \u03f5 ( x 3 - 0.05 ) )\n\nand \ud835\udc62 by\n\n(6.5) u ( x ) = \u03bc 2 sin ( \u03c0 x 1 ) H \u03f5 ( x 3 - 0.05 ) + \u03bc 1 sin ( \u03c0 x 1 ) H \u03f5 ( 0.05 - x 3 ) .\n\nIn Table 3, the results are reported when running the adaptive algorithm starting with an initial tolerance TOL = 0.5 , an initial 10 \u00d7 10 \u00d7 2 uniform mesh and several values of \u03bc 1 , \u03bc 2 and \ud835\udf16. In Figures 5 and 6, the adapted mesh and solution are shown when TOL = 0.25 and \u03bc 1 = 1 , \u03bc 2 = 2 and \u03f5 = 0.01 . Then, in order to keep the effectivity index close to one, \u03b7 K is divided by 3.45, and the adaptive algorithm is run again for several values of TOL when \u03bc 1 = 1 , \u03bc 2 = 100 and \u03f5 = 0.01 . The results are reported in Table 4. As expected, the effectivity index is now close to one. Again, a non-negligible fraction of the CPU time is needed to adapt the mesh.\n\n### Table 3\n\nTrue error, effectivity indices and aspect ratio for different values of tolerance TOL, when \ud835\udc62 and \ud835\udf07 are given by (6.5) and (6.4), with various values for and \u03bc 1 , \u03bc 2 and \ud835\udf16.\n\nTOL Vertices e i A e H 1 e i ZZ ar max ar av\n\u03bc 1 = 1 , \u03bc 2 = 2 , \u03f5 = 0.1\n\n0.5 93 2.82 0.39 0.88 121 28\n0.25 397 3.22 0.18 1.00 476 63\n0.125 1525 3.28 0.09 1.00 589 99\n0.0625 7511 3.27 0.05 0.99 1028 124\n0.03125 39512 3.29 0.02 0.99 1769 166\n\n\u03bc 1 = 1 , \u03bc 2 = 2 , \u03f5 = 0.01\n\n0.5 644 3.61 0.97 1.03 1220 173\n0.25 2426 3.65 0.46 0.99 2533 257\n0.125 13317 3.67 0.23 0.99 2552 277\n0.0625 32479 3.56 0.12 0.98 12101 979\n0.03125 214170 3.52 0.07 0.98 33075 1227\n\n\u03bc 1 = 1 , \u03bc 2 = 100 , \u03f5 = 0.1\n\n0.5 107 3.42 32.62 0.99 234 45\n0.25 366 3.45 15.67 1.03 377 72\n0.125 1570 3.36 8.22 1.01 645 102\n0.0625 7250 3.45 3.95 1.00 2024 132\n0.03125 39129 3.44 1.96 0.99 1961 184\n\n### Figure 5\n\nSolution on adapted mesh when TOL = 0.25 , \ud835\udc62 and \ud835\udf07 are given by (6.5) and (6.4), with \u03bc 1 = 1 , \u03bc 2 = 2 and \u03f5 = 0.01 .\n\n### Figure 6\n\nCut at x = 0.5 and y = 0.5 of the adapted mesh obtained when TOL = 0.25 , when \ud835\udc62 and \ud835\udf07 are given by (6.5) and (6.4), with \u03bc 1 = 1 , \u03bc 2 = 2 and \u03f5 = 0.01 .\n\n### Table 4\n\nTrue error, effectivity indices and aspect ratio for different values of tolerance TOL, when \ud835\udc62 and \ud835\udf07 are given by (6.5) and (6.4), with \u03bc 1 = 1 , \u03bc 2 = 100 and \u03f5 = 0.01 .\n\nTOL Vertices ei A e H 1 e i ZZ ar max ar av CPU tot CPU adapt\n0.25 191 1.06 195.85 1.01 864 143 23 19\n0.125 452 1.09 85.17 1.04 4542 310 46 39\n0.0625 1283 1.03 47.37 1.01 6684 694 94 78\n0.03125 6426 1.01 26.36 0.99 15832 1098 292 237\n0.015625 33745 1.10 13.60 0.99 117521 1588 2298 1402\n\n## 7 Conclusion\n\nWe introduced an error estimator for the approximation of elliptic problems with strongly varying diffusion coefficient. The error estimator is shown to be equivalent to the true error, up to high order terms. An adaptive algorithm is presented, and its efficiency and accuracy is demonstrated with various numerical experiments.\n\nFunding statement: Paride Passelli is financed by Rio Tinto Aluminium LRF Research Center at Saint Jean de Maurienne (EPFL industrial grant).\n\n## A Appendix: Proof of Theorem 1\n\nWe first prove the upper bound. Letting e = u - u h , using (2.1) and (2.2), we have, for any v h V h ,\n\n\u03a9 \u03bc | e | 2 = \u03a9 f ( e - v h ) - \u03a9 \u03bc u h ( e - v h ) .\n\nBy integration by parts over the triangles \ud835\udc3e, we obtain\n\n\u03a9 \u03bc | e | 2 = K T h K ( f + div ( \u03bc u h ) ) ( e - v h ) + 1 2 K [ \u03bc u h n ] ( e - v h )\n= K T h K ( \u03a0 K f + \u03a0 K \u03bc u h ) ( e - v h ) + 1 2 i = 1 3 l i [ \u03a0 l i \u03bc u h n ] ( e - v h )\n+ K T h K ( f - \u03a0 K f ) ( e - v h ) + K T h K ( \u03bc - \u03a0 K \u03bc ) u h ( e - v h )\n+ 1 2 K T h i = 1 3 l i [ ( \u03bc - \u03a0 l i \u03bc ) u h n ] ( e - v h ) .\nUsing the Cauchy\u2013Schwarz inequality, choosing v h = R h e and by using interpolation error estimates (3.1) and (3.2), we obtain\n\n\u03a9 \u03bc | e | 2 C ^ ( K T h \u03b7 K 2 + K T h ( f - \u03a0 K f L 2 ( K ) + ( \u03bc - \u03a0 K \u03bc ) u h L 2 ( K ) + 1 2 \u03bb 2 , K i = 1 3 [ ( \u03bc - \u03a0 l i \u03bc ) u h n ] L 2 ( l i ) ) \u03c9 K ( e ) ) .\n\nUsing assumption (4.2) and the fact that r 1 , K , r 2 , K form a basis, we have\n\n\u03c9 K 2 ( e ) C ^ \u03bb 2 , K 2 ( r 1 , K T G K ( e ) r 1 , K + r 2 , K T G K ( e ) r 2 , K ) = C ^ \u03bb 2 , K 2 e L 2 ( \u0394 K ) 2 .\n\nWe obtain the result by using the discrete Cauchy\u2013Schwarz inequality.\n\nIn order to prove the lower bound, we use the standard bubble functions [8, 37], adapted to the anisotropic case in [34], and modified here to account for the variations of \ud835\udf07.\n\nProposition 2\n\nThere exist a function \u03c6 H 0 1 ( \u03a9 ) and a constant C ^ > 0 (that depends only on the reference triangle K ^ ) such that, for any K T h ,\n\n(A.1) l i [ \u03a0 l i \u03bc u h n ] \u03c6 = ( | l i | \u03bb 1 , K \u03bb 2 , K ) 1 \/ 2 [ \u03a0 l i \u03bc u h n ] L 2 ( l i ) \u03c9 K ( e ) , i = 1 , 2 , 3 ,\n(A.2) K ( \u03a0 K f + \u03a0 K \u03bc u h ) \u03c6 = \u03a0 K f + \u03a0 K \u03bc u h L 2 ( K ) \u03c9 K ( e ) ,\n(A.3) ( \u03bb 1 , K 2 \u03c6 r 1 , K L 2 ( K ) 2 + \u03bb 2 , K 2 \u03c6 r 2 , K L 2 ( K ) 2 ) 1 \/ 2 C ^ \u03c9 K ( e ) ,\n(A.4) K \u03bc | \u03c6 | 2 C ^ ( \u03a0 K \u03bc + \u03bc - \u03a0 K \u03bc L ( K ) ) \u03c9 K 2 ( e ) \u03bb 2 , K 2 .\n\n## Proof\n\nWe claim that\n\n\u03c6 | K = C ^ K \u03a8 K + i = 1 3 C ^ l i \u03a8 l i ,\n\nwhere C ^ K , C ^ l i are constants that depend only on K ^ and that have to be computed, and \u03a8 K , \u03a8 l i are the usual bubble functions over \ud835\udc3e and its edges l i , i = 1 , 2 , 3 . For (A.1) and (A.2), the proof follows the same steps as the one of [34, Proposition 2]. In order to prove (A.3), we proceed again as in [34, Proposition 2] obtaining, for i = 1 , 2 ,\n\nK | \u03c6 r i , K | 2 C ^ \u03c9 K 2 ( e ) \u03bb 1 , K \u03bb 2 , K ( K | \u03a8 K r i , K | 2 + j = 1 3 K | \u03a8 l j r i , K | 2 ) ,\n\nwhich together with [21, relation (2.14)] gives (A.3). To prove (A.4), we note that\n\nK \u03bc | \u03c6 | 2 = K \u03a0 K \u03bc | \u03c6 | 2 + K ( \u03bc - \u03a0 K \u03bc ) | \u03c6 | 2\n\nand then apply [34, Proposition 4]. \u220e\n\nWe can now prove the lower bound. Using the definition of \u03b7 K 2 and identities (A.2) and (A.1), one can write\n\nK T h \u03b7 K 2 = K T h K ( \u03a0 K f + \u03a0 K \u03bc u h ) \u03c6 + 1 2 i = 1 3 l i [ \u03a0 l i \u03bc u h n ] \u03c6 ,\n\nwhere \u03c6 H 0 1 ( \u03a9 ) is the function given by Proposition 2. Therefore, adding and subtracting the correct quantities in the right-hand side, we have\n\nK T h \u03b7 K 2 = K T h K \u03bc e \u03c6 + K T h K ( \u03a0 K f - f ) \u03c6 + K T h K ( \u03a0 K \u03bc - \u03bc ) u h \u03c6 + 1 2 K T h i = 1 3 l i [ ( \u03a0 l i \u03bc - \u03bc ) u h n ] \u03c6 .\n\nUsing the properties of the L 2 projection \u03a0 K and \u03a0 l i , we obtain\n\nK T h \u03b7 K 2 = K T h K \u03bc e \u03c6 + K T h K ( \u03a0 K f - f ) ( \u03c6 - \u03a0 K \u03c6 ) + K T h K ( \u03a0 K \u03bc - \u03bc ) u h ( \u03c6 - \u03a0 K \u03c6 ) + 1 2 K T h i = 1 3 l i [ ( \u03a0 l i \u03bc - \u03bc ) u h n ] ( \u03c6 - \u03a0 l i \u03c6 ) .\n\nIntegration by parts over the triangles K T h and using the Cauchy\u2013Schwarz inequality, we get\n\nK T h \u03b7 K 2 K T h \u03bc 1 \/ 2 e L 2 ( K ) \u03bc 1 \/ 2 \u03c6 L 2 ( K ) + K T h ( ( \u03a0 K f - f ) L 2 ( K ) + ( \u03a0 K \u03bc - \u03bc ) u h L 2 ( K ) ) \u03c6 - \u03a0 K \u03c6 L 2 ( K ) + 1 2 K T h i = 1 3 [ ( \u03a0 l i \u03bc - \u03bc ) u h n ] L 2 ( l i ) \u03c6 - \u03a0 l i \u03c6 L 2 ( l i ) .\n\nNow, using results from [20, 21], we have that there exists a constant C ^ depending only on the reference triangle such that, for all \ud835\udc3e and all i = 1 , 2 , 3 ,\n\n\u03c6 - \u03a0 K \u03c6 L 2 ( K ) C ^ ( \u03bb 1 , K 2 \u03c6 r 1 , K L 2 ( K ) 2 + \u03bb 2 , K 2 \u03c6 r 2 , K L 2 ( K ) 2 ) 1 \/ 2 , \u03c6 - \u03a0 K \u03c6 L 2 ( l i ) C ^ \u03bb 2 , K ( \u03bb 1 , K 2 \u03c6 r 1 , K L 2 ( K ) 2 + \u03bb 2 , K 2 \u03c6 r 2 , K L 2 ( K ) 2 ) 1 \/ 2 .\n\nFinally, using the two bounds (A.3) and (A.4), Young\u2019s and the Cauchy\u2013Schwarz inequalities, we obtain\n\n(A.5) K T h \u03b7 K 2 C ^ ( \u03a9 \u03bc | e | 2 + K T h ( \u03a0 K \u03bc + \u03bc - \u03a0 K \u03bc L ( K ) ) \u03c9 K 2 ( e ) \u03bb 2 , K 2 + K T h ( \u03a0 K f - f L 2 ( K ) + ( \u03bc - \u03a0 K \u03bc ) u h L 2 ( K ) + 1 2 \u03bb 2 , K i = 1 3 [ ( \u03bc - \u03a0 l i \u03bc ) u h n ] L 2 ( l i ) ) \u03c9 K ( e ) ) .\n\nIn order to conclude the proof, we note that\n\n( \u03a0 K \u03bc + \u03bc - \u03a0 K \u03bc L ( K ) ) \u03c9 K 2 ( e ) \u03bb 2 , K 2 C ^ \u03bc 1 \/ 2 e L 2 ( \u0394 K ) 2 + C ^ \u03bc - \u03a0 K \u03bc L ( \u0394 K ) \u03bc min \u03bc 1 \/ 2 e L 2 ( \u0394 K ) 2\n\nThe final result is obtained inserting the above estimate in (A.5).\n\n# Acknowledgements\n\nThe referees are acknowledged for fruitful suggestions.\n\n### References\n\n[1] M. 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Asia Country Industrial Drone Laws
We provide industrial Drone services throughout Asia and the United Kingdom.
Our Industrial Drone Crew are the most highly trained and experienced in the industry.
View our Industrial drone Crew Profile here.
How we Work Around Asia.
Every country has different regulations for drone usage. In some countries you need to be licenced in that country to fly the drone and perhaps the individual drone has to be registered in that specific country. Under these circumstances our trained Industrial services Drone Crew will liaise with a Drone company in that country and work together, sometimes using our own payloads (Flir etc) as necessary to get the required result.
In other countries where we can bring in our own drone and fly it, we will undertake the assignment ourselves. If any permits are necessary we will have a local contact who will arrange this for us.
Drone Regulations by Country Updated: February 2019
According to Brunei's national aviation authority, the Brunei Department of Civil Aviation (DCA), drones are banned in Brunei and if you try to enter the country with a drone it will be confiscated at customs. The authority has also reminded the public that launching of any unmanned aircraft, commonly known as drone, is a prohibited activity under Section 21 of the Civil Aviation Order 2006.
The DCA said it is an offense to use UA, UAV and UAS as they can pose several safety and security risks to air navigation, controlled airspace and densely-populated areas.
Any such unregulated flying activities may have catastrophic consequences to aircraft operations resulting in injuries to persons and damage to properties, stated the DCA in its press release.
Having said that, if you intend to use your drone for commercial purposes, you will need to obtain prior permission. For those who have obtained permission, there are several drone laws that need to be followed when flying in the country. You must ensure that you adhere to the following:
Do not fly your drone over people or large crowds
Respect others privacy when flying your drone
Do not fly your drone over airports or in areas where aircraft are operating
You must fly during daylight hours and only fly in good weather conditions
Do not fly your drone in sensitive areas including government or military facilities. Use of drones or camera drones in these areas are prohibited
If you violate Brunei laws, even unknowingly, you may be expelled, arrested, or imprisoned.
Although exemptions on the use of UAs are granted by the DCA on a case-by-case basis with the terms, limitation and conditions set out in the authorization of the DCA, drone owners or any others who contravene or fail to comply with any provision of the Order is guilty of an offense and will be liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding $50,000 and imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years or both.
Authority: Brunei Department of Civil Aviation (DCA)
Website: http://www.mtic.gov.bn/dca/Theme/Home.aspx
In contrast, the good news is that not all countries in SE Asia are as strict as Brunei and in Cambodia a drone permit is not required, whether you are flying for recreational or commercial purposes. There are however restrictions as to where and how you can fly your drone. If you fly responsibly, the Cambodia State Secretariat of Civil Aviation (SSCA) has given travelers a pretty loose reign, which is wonderful for anyone wishing to capture its beauty.
This is with exemption of the drone bans in Phnom Penh, Angkor Park, and around any historic temples.
Permission to fly in Phnom Penh can be acquired by obtaining a permit from the Cinema and Cultural Diffusion Department and the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts of Cambodia. To fly in Angkor Park, you will need a permit from the Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap and clearance from the air traffic control because of the proximity of the temple to the airport.
It is essential however that you follow the FAA's rules for flying:
Drones are banned in Phnom Penh, Angkor Park, or around any historic temples unless you have written permission
Back in 2015 the government banned drones from the airspace of the nation's capital city without prior approval, citing privacy and security concerns. This ban is still in place today.
Authority: Cambodia State Secretariat of Civil Aviation (SSCA)
Website: http://www.civilaviation.gov.kh/en/
Drone use in China is allowed but getting a permit from the Civil Aviation Administration of China Flight Standards Division is probably very difficult. Nonetheless, here you are the conditions under which you can fly the little helper:
Regulations in China divide drones into 7 classes according to weight, all of which require a permit from the
Any drone weighing over 116kg requires a pilots license and UAV certification for operation
Not permitted to fly drones near airports or where aircraft are operating
Be careful when flying over people or built-up areas
Restrictions are much looser in rural or less populated areas, but much stricter in cities like Beijing or Shanghai
Refrain from flying your drone at Behai Park, or near the Forbidden City and other major monuments (don't fly it within the first or second ring of the city)
Info: www.caac.gov.cn
Drone use is allowed in Indonesia, but there are several drone laws that need to be followed when flying in the country. Operators must ensure that they follow the following drone laws when flying in Indonesia,
Do not fly your drone in sensitive areas including government or military facilities. Use of drones or camera drones in these areas are prohibited.
Do not fly higher than 150 meters (490 feet) without first obtaining a permit
Do not fly over temples
Call: +62 8 111 004 222
Email: hubud@dephub.go.id
Drone use in Japan is allowed but there are a lot of limitations about where you can fly it so beware. Tokyo and Kyoto main landmarks and parks are all off limits so go out into the countryside. I flew it in Niseko, really nice.
Have to fly your drone under 492 ft (150 meters)
Do not fly drones within 30m of people, building and cars, and stay away from all power lines
Do not fly drones over roads or over private property without permission of landowners
It is illegal to fly drones in these areas:
Less than 9 km away from airports
In highly populated urban areas, which includes most Japanese cities and all of Tokyo's 23 wards for drones weighing above 200g (that is pretty much any drone with a camera)
Over the Prime Minister's Office, or within 300m of the PMO
Over the Imperial Palace, or within 300m of the Imperial Palace
Over other key facilities including nuclear power plants
Osaka and Tokyo have banned drone use in all parks within the city limits
A new law has been passed recently that allows law enforcement officers the right to destroy drones found in violation of the law so be careful!
Info: www.mlit.go.jp
Drone use in Hong Kong is allowed and you will need a permit for the larger drones but not for the usual recreational ones like the Phantom 4 or the Mavik.
All drones under 7kg can be flown without a permit, but once it is above 7kg, an air permit is required from the Civil Aviation Department
Drones must be flown below 300 ft at all times
Avoid flying drones in the vicinity of an airport and areas where aircraft are operating, including:
North Lantau Coastal Area
Coastal areas from ai Lam Chung to Tsuen Wan and Tsing Yi Island,
Coastal areas at both sides of the Victoria Harbour and Shek Kong area.
Only fly your drone during daylight hours and in good weather conditions,
Avoid flying drones over crowded/congested areas and near installations that could present a risk to safety if damaged
Ensure safety of flying site by:
Making sure it is clear of vessels, vehicles, structures, power sources or people
Making sure it is flat to ensure safe landing and take off
Recommended areas of flying drone include:
Tai Tong in Yuen Long
Nam Sang Wai in Yuen Long
Tate's Cairn in Sha Tin
Tseung Kwan O in Sai Kung
Clear Water Bay Peninsula area in Sai Kung
Call: 2910 6627
Email: uas@cad.gov.hk
Info: http://www.cad.gov.hk/english/
Laos is fairly strict and requires that any drones that weigh 200 grams (0.44 pounds) or more permission must be obtained from the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications before flying.
Once permission is granted, you must:
Only fly during the day and in good weather conditions.
Do not fly over people or crowded areas.
Do not fly near airports or aircrafts that are in operation.
Respect the privacy of others when flying your drone.
After you have registered, you are then required to inform the department of the places where you intend to fly, before you can operate it.
The decision is the first of its kind promulgated to regulate drone use in Laos and was put in place after many members of the public were flying their drones in the skies of Vientiane and provinces freely without being regulated, which raised safety concerns.
The new decision categorizes drones, also known as Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), into three types:
Drones weighing not heavier than 200 grams (can be flown for fun without permission)
Drones weighing more than 200 grams but not heavier than 2 kilograms
Drones more than 2 kilograms.
The radio telecommunications frequency used for drones heavier than 200 grams must be between 2,400-2,500 MHz or 5,725 – 5,875 MHz. Equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP) should be 100. This radio frequency certificate must then be submitted together with an insurance certificate and proof of tax payment to the department, which will then issue a registration document.
Drones failing to meet the above MHz and EIRP standards are prohibited from flying in Lao skies.
The penalty faced by anyone who is found importing, producing, selling or flying drones heavier than 200 grams without permission from the relevant authorities will face a fine of one million kip (£90/ $120) per drone.
Authority: Department of Civil Aviation of Laos (DCAL)
Website: http://www.mpt.gov.la
Although flying a drone in Malaysia is legal, there are some important rules to know for flying a drone:
Drones may not be flown in Class A, B, C or G airspace; within an aerodrome traffic zone; or more than 400 feet above the ground.
Drone pilots must maintain a direct visual line of sight with their drones during operations.
Permission from the Director General must be obtained for commercial drone operations.
Drones weighing more than 20 kilograms (44 pounds) may not be flown without permission from the Director General.
The CAAM has categorized drones into three main categories:
Small Unmanned Aircraft System: Drones with a maximum weight of 20kg.
Small Unmanned Surveillance Aircraft: Drones that weigh a maximum of 20kg and are equipped with data acquisition devices (such as cameras and microphones) – this would be a typical DJI drone such as the Mavic Pro or Phantom
Unmanned Aircraft System of more than 20kg: All other drones weighing more than 20 kg
CAAM has stated that the general drone laws for Malaysia are:
The maximum permitted height of ascent is at 120 meters (400 feet).
Drone flights are only allowed within visibility. FPV flights can be carried out under certain conditions by experienced pilots.
It is recommended that you take out of an aviation liability insurance.
An authorization is required from a weight of 20 kilograms.
You have to keep 4.5 kilometers (3 miles) distance to airports and heliports.
A distance of 50 meters shall be maintained to other persons, vehicles, boats, and buildings.
Drone flights are not allowed near crowds (more than 1,000 people).
To obtain a flight permit, you must submit some documents. Amongst other things, you need training evidence and the declaration of consent of the landowners.
Generally, flights are only permitted in daylight.
Commercial flights must be approved by the Department of Civil Aviation. The permit costs 800 RM for the first year. The extension of the license costs 500 RM per year.
The Department of Civil Aviation in Malaysia is about to crack down on the illegal drone flying in the country and will set up its own enforcement unit to put a stop to it.
According to industry sources, about one million drones have been sold in the Asian country over the last four years, but what many drone owners do not realize is that is illegal to fly an unmanned aerial vehicle or drone for recreational or commercial purposes outside the compounds of their home. According to Civil Aviation Regulations 2016, all drone activity, no matter the size and purpose, requires a flying permit from DCA.
The penalties for flying drones illegally in Malaysia can be quite severe. Individuals can face fines up to RM50,000 (USD $12,166) or a jail sentence of up to three years. Companies that fly drones illegally can face fines up to RM100,000 (USD $24,332) and a maximum six months prison time for its officers.
Authority: Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia (CAAM)
Website: http://www.dca.gov.my/
Drone use is allowed in Mongolia, but under these conditions:
Do not fly drones over crowded or congested areas
Do not fly drones near airports or where aircraft is operating
Do not fly near military installations, power plants or other key facilities that could concern local authorities
Respect the privacy of others when flying drone
Fly drones in good weather conditions and daylight hours
Call: +976 11 282 051
Email: info@mcaa.gov.mn
Myanmar is a grey area when it comes to flying drones because the laws are constantly changing. However, as it stands drone use is allowed in Myanmar, BUT there are several country specific drone laws that need to be followed when flying in the country. Operators must ensure that they follow the following laws when flying in Myanmar:
You must first contact the aviation authority and get a permit before flying a drone in Myanmar
You cannot fly your drone near airports or in areas were aircraft are operating
You cannot fly your drone near military installations or restricted areas, doing so can result in fines and/or jail time
In 2017, two foreign journalists and two Myanmar nationals were sentenced to two months in jail at a Naypyitaw court under an unexpected charge after attempting to fly a drone near Myanmar's Parliament. This caused the authorities to tighten up the drone laws and anyone who is caught breaking them will face large fines and possible imprisonment.
Authority: Myanmar's Department of Civil Aviation
Website: https://www.dca.gov.mm/
Drone use is allowed in the Philippines, but there are several drone laws that need to be adhered to when flying in the region:
To fly a drone for commercial purposes, or to fly a drone that weighs 7 kilograms (15 pounds) or more, you must obtain a certificate from the CAAP
You cannot fly within 30 meters of a person who is not associated with operation of the drone
You cannot fly higher than 400 feet (122 meters)
You must not fly within 10km of an airport or in areas where aircraft are operating
You may not fly your drone over populated areas
Large drones weighing 7 kilograms (15 pounds) or more and drones for commercial use require a UAV certificate from the CAAP. The authorization has three parts:
UAV Controller / Pilot Certificate
UAV Registration
UAV Operator Certificate
To be eligible for the UAV Controller/ Pilot Certificate, you must complete a training course, pass an exam, and pass a flight demonstration. This certificate will be valid for five years.
The UAV Operator Certificate requires a letter of intent and detailed operations specifications and will be valid for three years.
For more information, the CAAP published a document that provides all information about the legislation (http://uavphilippines.com/dl/20151208%20-%20CAAP%20MC%2029-15.pdf)
Authority: Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP)
Website: http://www.caap.gov.ph/
Singapore's national aviation authority, the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS), states that flying a drone is legal in Singapore, but they ask that drone owners are aware of and compliant with the following drone regulations:
A permit is not required to fly a drone that weighs 7 kilograms (15 pounds) or less that is being flown 200 feet or below. If flying a drone heavier than 7 kilograms (15 pounds) or above 60 meters (200 feet), a permit is required.
Drones cannot be flown over people or crowds.
Drones may not interfere with emergency service providers, or over vehicles where their presence may distract the driver.
Drones may not be flown within 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) of an airport.
Drones may only be flown during daylight hours.
Drone pilots must always maintain a visual line of sight with their drone.
A permit is required however if you wish to do the following:
Fly above 200 feet
Fly in restricted airspace
Fly for business purposes (i.e. commercial flights)
Authority: Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS)
Website: https://www.caas.gov.sg/
Drone use is allowed in South Korea under the following circumstances:
You cannot fly within 5.5km of airfields or in areas where aircraft are operating
Avoid flying over people and respect privacy of others when flying your drone
You cannot fly near Seoul Plaza, crowded areas, military installations, power plants, or areas of facilities related to national security
You cannot fly when there is low visibility or yellow dust
Email: fsdiv01@korea.kr
Starting with Thailand, currently one of the most popular travel destinations in the region and a grey area for a number of people. Over the past few years the Thai authorities have tightened their laws on flying UAVs due to the increase of UAVs entering the country and the number of incidents around restricted zones such as airports, which have increased dramatically.
Therefore, the law now states that with no exceptions, any UAV that has a camera installed and/or weighing over 2kg must be registered. They have also made it essential that any UAVs weighing over 25kg, must receive permission from the minister of transport before flying can commence.
If and when you are lucky enough to be allowed to fly, you must adhere to the following rules:
Flying no higher than 90m.
Not flying closer than 9km/ 5miles from airport or temporary airfield.
Not flying in restricted areas.
Not flying closer than 30m to any person, vehicle, building or construction.
Any act of violation is subjected to up to one year imprisonment or fined up to 40,000THB (USD $1,200) or both.
So if you are traveling through Thailand and wish to fly your drone, make sure you follow the above, because failure to do so could land you in big trouble.
Authority: Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand (CAAT)
Website: https://www.caat.or.th/en/archives/category/aviation-en/drone-en
Vietnam has some rather unique laws when it comes to flying UAV. The Ministry of Defense is responsible for the regulation of drone maneuvers. Under the current legal situation, you need authorization from the Ministry of Defense and although you can put in the form yourself it's in Vietnamese and it can take up to 3 weeks to be approved so this requires some solid planning.
What most foreigners do is they get a company to do the process for them. It takes the hassle out of the process and delays are much shorter (some companies can do it in 4-5 days).
But of course, this process will cost you: between $ 350 and $ 700 depending on who is doing your permit. And that's only for one day of flying. So depending on the number of flights you are planning, this can quickly put you in some major debt.
A unique flight license is required for every drone flight conducted in Vietnam. Applications must be submitted at least 14 days before the planned date of the flight to the Operations Bureau of the General Command Post of the Ministry of Defense.
Drones may not be used to carry radioactive substances, flammable, or explosive materials.
Drones may not be used to launch, shoot or jettison harmful objects or substances or those containing hazards.
Drones may not be mounted with aerial equipment and/ or used for aerial videography or photographing activities without a license issued for that purpose.
Drones may not fly flags or banners, release leaflets or otherwise be used for propaganda purposes.
There have been reports of drones being confiscated at Vietnam airport and then given back to passengers on departure, so be prepared… if you try your luck, you may lose your drone.
Also, if you decide to fly without a permit, make sure you stay away from populated places because as you will see, Vietnamese people are usually very curious about "flycams" as they call it here and they will attract attention your way, just because they want to see it.
Authority: Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam (CAAV)
Website: https://www.caa.gov.vn/
Green: Drone use is generally allowed.
Yellow: Drone use is limited or may require cumbersome registration processes.
Red: Drone import or use is prohibited or otherwise heavily restricted.
Grey: No data or there are no defined or applicable UAV laws.
Master List of Drone Laws by Country & State
UAV Drone Laws by Country
Drone laws Asia (w/map)
Drone laws by Country (Email addresses)
Women Who Drone Asian List
Bangkok Video Productions Operates Aerial Filming Drones with the following licenses:
Royal Aeronautics Sports Association of Thailand ID: B15-101-0740
Thailand Film Office Coordinator license Number: 1 1014 01752 24
Thailand Flight - Regulations & Restricted Areas
Civil Aviation Department Air Navigation Act 2497 Restricted & Danger Zones Bangkok Restricted Area Map
Official Government Document Here | Thailand Airports Map | Thailand VFR Map
Regulations: Thailand UAV Drone Regulations & Laws Thai Laws & Regulations (ENG Translations) | {
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Willie Louis dies at 76; witness to 1955 murder of Emmett Till
Willie Louis was hidden by a local black doctor is Mississippi after agreeing to testify. Despite his testimony, the two white men accused of killing Emmett Till were acquitted. After the trial, Louis moved to Chicago and changed his last name, which had been Reed.
(Charles Cherney / Chicago Tribune)
By Naomi Nix
July 24, 2013 12 AM PT
Willie Louis, a witness to the murder of Emmett Till who testified in court in the case that opened the nation's eyes to the dangerous discrimination facing African Americans in the 1950s, died of intestinal bleeding July 18 at a hospital in a Chicago suburb, his family said. He was 76.
After the trial, fearing for his life in the South, Louis fled to Chicago, changed his name and slipped out of the public eye for nearly 50 years.
Louis was born June 14, 1937, in Greenwood, Miss., and lived with his grandparents, who worked as sharecroppers, said his wife, Juliet.
On Aug. 28, 1955, the 14-year-old Till, who was visiting Mississippi from Chicago, was murdered after he allegedly whistled at a white woman. On that day, Louis, then known as Willie Reed, noticed two white men driving a truck into a barn with two black males in the back.
He was standing with an older woman near a well when he heard a male screaming for his life inside the barn, his wife said.
"He heard all this hollering and screaming until there was no more hollering and screaming," she said.
Later that day, a white man approached Louis with a gun, Juliet Louis said. "He said, 'Boy, did you see anything?' And he said 'no.' He said, 'Did you hear anything?' He said 'no.'"
The next morning he found out that Till's lynched body had been dumped in the Tallahatchie River.
Louis' grandfather told him he shouldn't tell anyone because it was too dangerous to accuse a white man of murder, but a few days later civil rights leaders asked him about what he may have seen, his wife said.
"He said he couldn't have lived with it; he had to tell them what he saw," she said.
Louis agreed to testify in court, and a local black doctor hid him until the trial started later that year. Despite his testimony, the two white men accused of the murder were acquitted by an all-white jury.
After the trial, Louis took a train to Chicago, where he changed his name. The psychological stress of witnessing a murder and testifying in court took a toll, causing him to suffer a nervous breakdown that landed him in a hospital, his wife said.
Till's family lost touch with Louis soon after the trial, Till's relative Wheeler Parker said.
"We thought something had happened to him," Parker said. "We thought someone killed him."
In the late 1950s, Louis became an orderly at Woodlawn Hospital in Chicago and later at Jackson Park Hospital. He retired in 2006.
Louis met his future wife in 1971 at Jackson Park Hospital. She was working as a nursing aide in the intensive care unit when Louis came to pick up a patient.
The couple married in 1976, but it would be eight more years before Juliet Louis discovered her husband was a witness in the Till case, she said. Even after she found out, "he didn't talk about it much."
That changed when a journalist, Stanley Nelson, came to Louis' home in Chicago asking him to participate in his research project about the murder.
"Stanley started having him bring back memories," his wife said. "It opened up a wound."
Nelson's research turned into a book and a documentary, which eventually aired on PBS. Nelson introduced Louis to Till's mother. Soon after, Louis began talking about what he witnessed publicly at community events and in a 2004 "60 Minutes" interview.
Those close to him hope his legacy will last beyond his death.
"I think his story needs to be told over and over again," Parker said. "He's a great role model in doing what's right."
Besides his wife, Louis' survivors include a stepson, seven grandchildren and 21 great-grandchildren.
nnix@tribune.com
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The year 2015, which saw Singapore's very own Botanic Gardens listed as one of UNESCO's heritage sites, the unveiling of a new Downtown Line and the National Gallery art museum, was a particularly eventful one for us. An international recognition though it was, our clinching the ISO 22000:2005 certification stood at the time as one among other monuments to the Farm's unique heritage. If anything, our tried and tested path reaches back to 1981 when our founder, Mr. Wan Bock Thiaw, rented a small swathe of land along Old Jurong Road. Clearly, the vehicle of our success was already en route to self-sustainability by the time innovations we pioneered in food processing entered anyone's radar.
To be sure, a few detours had been made in light of certain leasing issues we face in land strapped Singapore. But thankfully, we have not had to look back since finessing this, as well as many other hurdles of similar dimensions. So was, but much more so still, Mr. Wan's founding vision critical to our survival all along. It was after all his faith in a niche market that paved the way for our position as the premium brand of produce. Besides supplying restaurateurs who feature frog delicacies on their menus, we now count many of Singapore's retail chains among our wholesale clients.
And then came the big move. On November 29th in the year 1993, we shifted to our present home in Lim Chu Kang. But we kept the name because nothing else has really changed. Our dedication to deliver the highest quality produce remains entwined as ever with the farm's original mantra. In this regard, an unfailing adherence to a strict policy against the use of hormones and antibiotics becomes for us a condition of our success to this day. All the more against the backdrop of health-consciousness on the rise among Singaporeans, we believe our farm's best days are still ahead of us for as long as we are able to tap into this market through proper education. It was toward this end that Mr. Wan's youngest daughter, Chelsea A.K.A. 'The Frogologist', played a pivotal role in the design of our tour itineraries, she was also instrumental in the R&D work that gave rise to our premium Hashima with American Ginseng (launched in 2012). Today, Jurong Frog Farm has also ventured into the skincare industry partnering a local biotechnology company by way of our Fruge Bioactive Collagen Series.
This, at any rate, has been our metamorphosis thus far firmly cementing the American Bullfrog as our main product.
1970s – Mr. Wan Bock Thiaw rented a plot of land along Old Jurong Road for the commercial purpose of breeding American Bullfrogs. All told, we started with 80 fibre tanks.
1981 – Jurong Frog Farm was officially registered as a company on October 29th.
1990s – A burgeoning demand for frog meat called for a new business model that entails importing live frogs from Malaysia, whereupon the farm is no longer operates solely as a breeding ground.
1993 – On November 29th, we relocated to the Agro-Technology Park in Lim Chu Kang (yes, all 1.2 hectares of it!)
1994 – To ensure our frogs are beyond the reach of natural predators like snakes, major work was done on this greener pasture (literally a grassland) to pave walkways with concrete.
1997 – We commenced R&D work from the ground up–PROJECT: DRIED HASHIMA.
1999 – "JFF Specially Selected Dried Snow Jelly" was launched.
2001 – An AVA licensed slaughterhouse was built to comply with industry best practices. At the same time, we installed a cold room (-18 degree Celsius) the better to subject all frozen products to our quick-freeze procedure.
2005 – "JFF Essence of American Bullfrog with Cordyceps and American Ginseng", a first of its kind, was launched!
2006 – The company welcomes Mr. Wan's youngest daughter Chelsea into the family business. Shortly thereafter, preparations were afoot to revamp the JFF Farm Tours packages. In that same year, JFF was admitted as member into Kranji Countryside Association (KCA).
2010 – The Company was restructured as JFF PTE LTD on September 2nd. Prior to this we had been a Sole Proprietorship.
2011 – R&D focusing on the bottling of JFF Premium Hashima Dessert began in early 2011.
2012 – We successfully launched "JFF Premium Hashima with American Ginseng" on October 14th.
2014 – FROGOLOGY PTE LTD and THE ROYAL FROG SHOP PTE LTD were incorporated in the month of July.
2015– JFF PTE LTD received its ISO 22000:2005 international certification (Food Safety Management System) on June 26th.
2018– JFF PTE LTD renewed its ISO 22000:2005 under Socotec Certification Singapore f.k.a Certification International Singapore Pte Ltd (CIS) on the June 29th.
Gabbe the Mascot
If you come by the farm today, the first thing you will notice is a wall emblazoned with our name. What is so striking about it are its vitality and zest–the same qualities embodied by our mascot in less flamboyant style (he usually dons plain white shirt and yellow boots).
Yet there's no denying the exuberance Gabbe brings to the farm in his capacity as mascot, even though he probably feels more at home blending in with our farm workers. In fact, so down to earth is he that you can rarely see him wearing the proverbial crown which, in most fables concerning it, remains hidden like a gem anyway.
THE VALUES WE HOLD DEAR
Giving back to the habitat
Assiduous in customer service
Bashful about extravagance
Bubble of wisdom in all things frog
Enthusiasm for health awareness | {
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Avis Used Car Sales in West Palm Beach & Vero Beach, FL
Phone: 877-569-8880 Coronavirus: Safety and Buying Flexibility - Learn More
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You can easily find Avis Car Sales in West Palm Beach on S Military Trail. We're just two miles south of Mounts Botanical Gardens, in between Summit Boulevard and Forest Hill Boulevard. We're one of the most conveniently located used car lots in Palm Beach County.
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1141 S Military Trl
Directions West Palm Beach, FL 33415
Avis Car Sales West Palm Beach
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With Avis Car Sales, you can feel confident that you're buying a car rental at a great value and a fair price. All vehicles listed on this site are best-value used cars, priced below market value (based off Kelley Blue Book Typical List Price) with a no-haggle price tag guarantee. That means you can review product specifications, take the car for a test drive, and buy it without having to negotiate. Working with multiple financing companies, Avis Car Sales offers the best value for certified used cars. We think you'll appreciate this streamlined, customer-friendly shopping and buying experience and encourage you to get started today.
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Experience the Ultimate Test Drive with a wide range of vehicles from domestic to foreign manufacturers. You'll have a wide variety of sedans, SUVs, minivans and vans, convertibles, and eco-friendly hybrids to choose from, and we're always expanding our fleet.
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Avis Car Sales offers several finance options designed to fit your individual needs. We have access to some of the most competitive rates and terms through our diverse lending partners, including many local Credit Unions. We are committed to finding you the best solution to suit your needs.
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In the rare event of a breakdown, we provide Rental Car Coverage up to $35 per day for a maximum of ten days for rental car expenses incurred due to a covered mechanical breakdown or manufacturer's warranty repair. We will also give you up to $75 for towing charges per covered mechanical breakdown. If your car breaks down more than 100 miles from home, you'll be reimbursed up to $100 per day for a maximum of $500 per occurrence for food and lodging per covered mechanical breakdown.
We'll also cover you for up to $50 for emergency services, such as a flat tire, running out of gas, lockouts and jump-starts.
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Het wegennet van Ghana vormt een netwerk met een lengte van 40.186 kilometer. Hiervan is ongeveer 10.000 kilometer verhard. Het land heeft twee autosnelwegen, die beide in de omgeving van de hoofdstad Accra liggen. Dit zijn de Accra - Tema Motorway en de George Walker Bush Motorway.
De doorgaande wegen worden sinds 1974 onderhouden door de Ghana Highway Authority. Dit overheidsorgaan beheert ongeveer een derde van het wegennet van Ghana.
Bewegwijzering
De bewegwijzering bestaat uit blauwe borden met witte letters. Wegnummers worden met prefix in platte tekst weergegeven.
Wegnummering
De wegnummering van Ghana bestaat uit drie lagen: de nationale wegen (Engels: National Roads), de interregionale wegen (Engels: Inter-Regional Roads) en de regionale wegen (Engels: Regional Roads).
De nationale wegen verbinden de belangrijkste steden met elkaar en met het buitenland. Ze worden aangeduid met het prefix N. De interregionale wegen verbinden regionale centra in verschillende regio's met elkaar. Deze wegen worden aangeduid met het prefix IR. De laatste categorie, de regionale wegen, vormen een netwerk dat kleinere steden met elkaar en met de nationale wegen verbindt. De belangrijke regionale wegen worden aangeduid met het prefix R gevolgd door twee cijfers, de minder belangrijke met een R gevolgd door drie cijfers.
De nationale en interregionale wegen zijn in een schaakbordpatroon genummerd. De oneven nummers lopen van oost naar west en de even nummers van noord naar zuid.
Autosnelwegen worden niet apart genummerd. Ze vallen onder een van de drie categorieën. Op dit moment zijn beide autosnelwegen onderdeel van een nationale weg: de N1.
Externe links
Ghana Highway Authority
Ministry of Transportation | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 1,482 |
info@santaclasutravel.com+2 02 22 560 555 / +2 02 2453 55 88
Santa Claus Travel
Classical Egypt
Desert Safari Adventures
Moevenpick MS Hamees
Iberotel Crown Empress
M/S Sabena Al Kahila
Sun Rise Nile Saray
MS Sabena Aljamila
M/Y Alyssa
Radamis II
Oberoi Zahra
Movenpick SS Misr
Amarco II
Sanctuary Sun Boat IV
Nile Premium
Movenpick Royal Lotus
Movenpick Royal Lilly
Royal La Terrasse
Radamis I
Sonesta St. George
Dahabya
Adventure and Specialty Tours
Land Cruise Safari
Nile Cruise
Egypt Info
Introduction To Egypt's History
Egypt's Attractions & Hot Spots
Cairo, Pyramids
Egyptian Deserts & Oasis
Facts About Egypt
Map of Egypt
Ancient Egyptian history is a long and complex one with more than 3,000 years of details. Throughout these 3,000 years, ancient Egyptians lived under about 30 dynasties, with each dynasty being based on the lineage of the kings/pharaohs. Throughout all these years, the "country" experienced many changes, some being very drastic. The land began as two (Upper & Lower Egypt), with King Menes uniting the two regions at around 3,500 B.C.E. From this point on, the pharaohs were referred to as the rulers of the Two Kingdoms. In art and on tombs, the pharaohs were now depicted with the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt combined to become one crown, known as the pschent.
The reason for the difference in names refers to the flow of the life-giving Nile River. Being that the Nile flows from East Africa's highlands down to the Mediterranean Sea, Southern Egypt became known as Upper Egypt, and Northern Egypt became known as Lower Egypt. As these two regions developed independently of each other, the differences between them were evident after the unification of the country, though customs from both regions were combined.
Ancient Egypt also saw the rise of a complex polytheistic religion, which included many gods and the controversy and conflict of one pharaoh (Akhenaton) even trying to convert the country to monotheism. With his failure, the country reverted back to polytheism during the reign of his son.
Relying heavily on the river Nile, the ancient Egyptian civilization expanded and prospered. Trading also allowed the ancient Egyptians to gain much wealth. With this wealth, the royal tombs began to become more elaborate, with the building of pyramids beginning from 2630 B.C.E. With the rise of the Greek and Roman civilizations, the ancient Egyptians soon came under the rule of foreign leaders. With the rule of the Romans came the introduction of Christianity, leading to the inevitable decline of the ancient Egyptian religion and society.For many, the scope of Egypt's history is difficult to comprehend. Its history covers some five thousand years, and encompasses the origin of civilization, the rise of the Greeks and Romans, the establishment of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions, the colonial era when first France and then the English ruled the country, and finally, a return to independence. Egypt has played an important role through all of these eras, and today one can find monuments that evidence Egypt's role in most of the world's historic events, from the beginning of mankind until the present. More and more, we are not only learning about the history of mankind in Egypt, but also about his prehistory, the way that he migrated and finally began to organize communities that eventually lead to a civilized world.
In Egypt, we find the earliest detailed records of warfare recorded thousands of years ago, but we also find the cemeteries and monuments of the world's last global war, World War II. In Egypt, we find some of the first written words of civilization, but we also find great thinkers and writers through the Greek period, into the Christian era, the archaic Islamic period and even modern Nobel Literates. In Egypt, we find ancient pyramids and giant columns supporting massive temples, but we can now find these architectural elements spread throughout the world. Here, along with the first monumental buildings made of stone, we also find the first paved roads, the first wines and beer and even the first peace treaties between organized governments. However, we also find the world's first scientists, doctors, architects and mathematicians.
Egypt is our window to humanity's distant past and in understanding its history, we find both mankind's greatest glories and achievements, as well as his often repeated mistakes. We may follow along with the building of empires, only to see them collapse again and again. We find great men and rulers of renowned, but we often also see their ultimate demise.
And here, we learn about religion, its evolution and, as the world grows older, its replacement with newer religions. Yet, the ancient Egyptian religion has never really completely died out. Even today, many Egyptians continue customs, including some aspects of religion, held over from thousands of years ago. In fact, throughout the world, aspects of the ancient Egyptian religion, particularly funerary, continue to effect our modern lives.
We hope you enjoy our efforts to bring Egyptian history and its monuments to your fingertips. Here one will find just about every aspect of ancient Egypt, from culture to people, from monuments to knowledge. Take the time to understand ancient Egyptian history, and we feel certain you will find, within this knowledge, a better understanding of this modern world in which we live.
Tweets by @SantaClausTrav1
info@santaclasutravel.com
+2 02 22 560 555 / +2 02 2453 55 88
Designed By EgyProTech | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 290 |
The West Bengal Legislative Assembly election, 1967 was held in Indian state of West Bengal in 1967 to elect 280 members to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly. United Front led by Ajoy Mukherjee won majority of seats in the election, and formed first non-Congress government of the state.
Results
|-
!colspan=2|Party
!Candidates
!Seats
!Votes
!Vote%
!Seat change
|-
|
|align="left"|Indian National Congress||280||127||5,207,930||41.13%|| 30
|-
|
|align="left"|Communist Party of India (Marxist)||135||43||2,293,026||18.11%|| 43
|-
|
|align="left"|Bangla Congress||80||34||1,286,028||10.16%|| 34
|-
|
|align="left"|Communist Party of India||62||16||827,196||6.53%|| 34
|-
|
|align="left"|All India Forward Bloc||42||13||561,148||4.43%||
|-
|
|align="left"|Samyukta Socialist Party||26||7||269,234||2.13%|| 7
|-
|
|align="left"|Praja Socialist Party||26||7||238,694||1.88%|| 2
|-
|
|align="left"|Revolutionary Socialist Party||16||6||238,694||2.14%|| 2
|-
|
|align="left"|Socialist Unity Centre of India||8||4||238,694||0.72%|| 1
|-
|
|align="left"|Marxist Forward Bloc||58||1||167,934||1.33%|| 1
|-
|
|align="left"|Revolutionary Communist Party of India||58||1||167,934||1.33%|| 8
|-
|
|align="left"|Bharatiya Jana Sangh||58||1||167,934||1.33%|| 1
|-
|
|align="left"|Swatantra Party||21||1||102,576||0.81%|| 1
|-
|
|align="left"|Independents||327||31||1,708,011||13.49%|| 20
|-
!colspan=2|Total
|1058
|280
|12,663,030
|
|
|-
|}
Elected members
Post-Poll Alliance
United Front led by Ajoy Mukherjee formed the Government. United Front was combination of People's United Left Front, an electoral combination of Communist Party of India, the Bangla Congress, the All India Forward Bloc and the Bolshevik Party of India with United Left Front (1967), electoral alliance of The front comprised the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Samyukta Socialist Party, the Socialist Unity Centre of India, the Marxist Forward Bloc, the Revolutionary Communist Party of India, the Workers Party of India and the Revolutionary Socialist Party.
References
State Assembly elections in West Bengal
1960s in West Bengal
West Bengal | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 315 |
Tuesday, 14 March 2017 - Strasbourg Final edition
Control of the acquisition and possession of weapons ***I
European Parliament legislative resolution of 14 March 2017 on the proposal for a directive of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Council Directive 91/477/EEC on control of the acquisition and possession of weapons (COM(2015)0750 – C8-0358/2015 – 2015/0269(COD))
(Ordinary legislative procedure: first reading)
– having regard to the Commission proposal to Parliament and the Council (COM(2015)0750),
– having regard to Article 294(2) and Article 114 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, pursuant to which the Commission submitted the proposal to Parliament (C8-0358/2015),
– having regard to the reasoned opinions submitted, within the framework of Protocol No 2 on the application of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality, by the Polish Senate and the Swedish Parliament, asserting that the draft legislative act does not comply with the principle of subsidiarity,
– having regard to the opinion of the European Economic and Social Committee of 27 April 2016(1),
– having regard to the provisional agreement approved by the responsible committee under Rule 69f(4) of its Rules of Procedure and the undertaking given by the Council representative by letter of 20 December 2016 to approve Parliament's position, in accordance with Article 294(4) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union,
– having regard to the report of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and the opinion of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (A8-0251/2016),
1. Adopts its position at first reading hereinafter set out;
2. Takes note of the Commission statement annexed to this resolution;
3. Calls on the Commission to refer the matter to Parliament again if it replaces, substantially amends or intends to substantially amend its proposal;
(1) OJ C 264, 20.7.2016, p. 77.
Position of the European Parliament adopted at first reading on 14 March 2017 with a view to the adoption of Directive (EU) 2017/... of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Council Directive 91/477/EEC on control of the acquisition and possession of weapons
P8_TC1-COD(2015)0269
(As an agreement was reached between Parliament and Council, Parliament's position corresponds to the final legislative act, Directive (EU) 2017/853.)
ANNEX TO THE LEGISLATIVE RESOLUTION
COMMISSION STATEMENT
The Commission recognises the importance of a well-functioning standard for deactivation, which contributes to improved levels of safety and gives authorities reassurance that deactivated weapons are properly and effectively deactivated.
The Commission will, therefore, accelerate the work on the revision of the deactivation criteria conducted by national experts in the Committee established under Directive 91/477/EEC in order to allow the Commission to adopt, by the end of May 2017, in accordance with the committee procedure established by Directive 91/477/EEC, subject to a positive opinion by national experts, a Commission Implementing Regulation amending Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2015/2403 of 15 December 2015 establishing common guidelines on deactivation standards and techniques for ensuring that deactivated firearms are rendered irreversibly inoperable. The Commission calls on the Member States to fully support the acceleration of this work. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 2,487 |
Nicholas Astrella (ur. 24 grudnia 1975) – nowozelandzki zapaśnik walczący w stylu wolnym. Brązowy medalista mistrzostw Wspólnoty Narodów w 1995.
Czterokrotny srebrny medalista mistrzostw Oceanii w latach 1995 – 2000.
Przypisy
Nowozelandzcy zapaśnicy
Urodzeni w 1975 | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 6,209 |
Are you a beach babe or a trekking enthusiast? Or your idea of vacationing is to relax over fruity sangria soaking up the sun and the bliss? Well, Florida, with its green waters, rich fauna, natural springs and clear blue skies, offers it all. If you are in search of well-equipped camping grounds in this tropical paradise where you can head out to on your motor home, we have some brilliant suggestions etched out for you. Pick up the plan that suits you best and hit the roads on your plush abode on wheels.
Of bird watching and more: If you are looking for a mix of fun and relaxation, be it for a week or a day trip, head out with your RV to the St Lucie Campground adjoining the St Lucie Canal on the south. It being a part of the Okeechobee Waterway, you can spend your day fishing, watching boats or perhaps a manatee, amid the clear water. If you love bird watching, step out to nearby Hobe Sound National Wildlife Refuge to take a glimpse of a variety of bird species. The highlight of St Lucie, however, is the pretty waterfront tent sites that lets you sit under the open sky, and you wouldn't have to sit within the confines of your RV through the day in search of comfort. Most sites have both electric and water hook-ups. Food freaks can make the most of the many restaurants lined down the road. The campground is open round the year.
A sporty retreat: Adventure junkies, if you thought that RV-ing is not for you, here's a reality check. A host of camping destinations across Florida offer opportunities to give you that adrenaline rush through various activities such as snorkeling, canoeing, kayaking and more. We lay our bets on the US's first undersea park — the John Pennenkamp Coral Reef State Park that covers around 178 nautical square miles of coral reefs, mangrove swamps and sea grass. While you can indulge in a host of adventure sports here, you will also be able to avail all the usual facilities that are common on camping grounds. Right from water and electricity hook ups, flush toilets, hot showers to picnic areas, barbeque grills, restaurants, campfire programs and overnight pet stay facilities, this place has it all. However, there are certain restrictions with respect to pullouts and awnings so find that out before starting your journey.
The call of the wilderness: If going wild on an exciting trek is what thrills you, the Florida Keys RV Park and resort could be the right choice. Home to a large variety of endangered animals and plants, it's located at the heart of Florida, and the 15 miles of path by the camp ground lets you hike, bike and trek from morning to sundown. The easy location also lets you explore some of the hottest food, shopping and sightseeing hubs. This place accommodates only self-contained RVs and motor homes – right from smaller rigs to large class A motor homes. Be it waterfront, premium or standard sites, all of them are well equipped with electric, cable, water, sewer and free WiFi hot spots.
Getting beach-y: Needless to say, Florida beaches are divine, so you can't ignore them for long. Whether you want to lie back and watch the sunset or trek down the coastal forests, there's something for every RV enthusiast. St George Island State Park is one such camping spot that promises to leave you enthralled. Featuring 60 campsites with electricity, water, two bathhouses and a dump station, this place has six big picnic shelters with all amenities. The oceanfront campgrounds, on the other hand are a visual delight so be assured to be charmed by the glittering white sand coves, salt marshes and shore birds or your feet be kissed by sea turtles.
Eat, sip and relax: Don't want any adventure or activities? Just want to lay back, sip of your favorite red wine over Beatles, and the grill smoking up the steaks and the asparagus? Well, there are plenty of such campground options, too, where you can head out to escape from your mundane routine for a much-deserved break from work, without keeping any particular plan of action in mind. You could stop by at the St Andrews State Park by the Gulf of Mexico and Grand Lagoon, and watch the sunset over the emerald green waters as you enjoy a relaxing lunch at their picnic pavilion. The Colt Creek State Park, the Silver Springs State Park and the Ravine Gardens State Park, all of them in Central Florida, are also good options with similar camping and parking features.
For a hassle-free stay, it always makes sense to make reservations in advance at least during the peak camping season — November through March. Rains are common during the afternoon in between June and September. Cost of staying in public parks may range between 8 to 25 dollars per night while private park rates may shoot up to 50 dollars. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 4,350 |
[Free Bill of Sale Documents]
Bangladeshi Bill of Sale
[What is a Bill of Sale?]
A Bill of Sale, similar to a Sales Agreement, is used to document that a buyer has bought and paid for one or more specific items (worth more than $500) (e.g. car, animal, electronics) from the seller and is entitled to ownership of the item(s). In addition, the time and place of the purchase, purchase price, method of payment, and other related details are also included. Depending on your jurisdiction, a Bill of Sale may be required as a condition of transferring title to the buyer. A Bill of Sale CANNOT be used to buy or sell real estate.
Simply answer the questions below to personalize your Bill of Sale
This form also known as: bill of sale, receipt, free pdf bill of sale contract, car / auto / automobile / vehicle / horse / boat / equipment bill of sale, transfer title form, change title form, vehicle title transfer, bill of sale template, bill of sale document, billofsale, sales receipt
Sample Bill of Sale
Bangladesh Bill of Sale
Bill of Sale Definition
What type of property are you selling?
Aircraft Animal Appliance Electronics Firearms Furniture Motor Vehicle Power Tool Water Craft Other
Type of property (e.g. Painting):
Seller Details:
Seller's Contact Information:
First Seller's Contact Information:
State/Province (and Country, if appropriate):
Second Seller's Contact Information:
Buyer Details:
Buyer's Contact Information:
First Buyer's Contact Information:
Second Buyer's Contact Information:
What is the purchase price? (e.g. 1250.00)
Select the currency:
Australian Dollars (AUD) Canadian Dollars (CAD) Euros (EUR) Great Britain Pounds (GBP) Peso (PHP) United States Dollars (USD)
Are sales taxes included in the purchase price?
Select the method of payment:
Bank Draft Cash Certified Check Promissory Note Other
Aircraft Information:
Power Tool Information:
Furniture Information:
Animal Information:
Electronics Information:
Appliance Information:
Firearm Information:
Motor Vehicle Information:
Water Craft Information:
Manufacturer (e.g. Boeing):
Model (e.g. 737-900):
Do you wish to add a more detailed description of the Aircraft features?
Describe the additional features here (e.g. leather seats):
Where is the Aircraft currently located? (State/Province and Country, if appropriate)
Please enter a detailed description of the power tool:
E.g. A 12 Amp electric reciprocating saw is being sold.
Where is the Power Tool currently located? (State/Province and Country, if appropriate)
Please enter a detailed description of the furniture:
E.g. A teak dining table with four chairs is being sold.
Where is the Furniture currently located? (State/Province and Country, if appropriate)
Are you selling more than one animal?
Please enter a detailed description of the animal(s):
E.g. Two golden retriever puppies are being sold.
What is the current location of the Animal(s)? (State/Province and Country, if appropriate)
Please enter a detailed description of the property:
E.g. One Monet oil painting is being sold.
Where is the property currently located? (State/Province and Country, if appropriate)
Manufacturer (e.g. LG):
Model (e.g. 300-48):
Style (e.g. Chrome, upright):
Do you wish to add a more detailed description of the Electronics?
Describe the additional features here:
Where are the Electronics currently located? (State/Province and Country, if appropriate)
Manufacturer (e.g. Kenmore):
Style (e.g. Refrigerator/Freezer):
Do you wish to add a more detailed description of the Appliance?
Describe the additional features here (e.g. built-in cooler, back-up battery):
Where is the Appliance currently located? (State/Province and Country, if appropriate)
Manufacturer (e.g. Remington):
Model (e.g. 721):
Style (e.g. Shotgun):
Do you wish to add a more detailed description of the Firearms?
Where are the Firearms currently located? (State/Province and Country, if appropriate)
Manufacturer (e.g. Mazda):
Model (e.g. MPV):
Style (e.g. Four-door minivan):
Vehicle Identification Number (VIN):
You can usually find the VIN on the base of the windshield, or on the vehicle's title.
Do you wish to add a more detailed description of the Vehicle's features?
Where is the Motor Vehicle currently located? (State/Province and Country, if appropriate)
Odometer Disclosure Statement:
What is the current odometer reading?
Is this number in miles or kilometers?
Miles Kilometers
Is the current odometer reading accurate?
Yes No, it is in excess of mechanical limits No, it is otherwise wrong
Has the odometer been altered or repaired while in your possession?
No Yes, and it was reset to the same mileage Yes, and it was zeroed
What was the odometer reading before zeroing?
Manufacturer (e.g. Seadoo):
Model (e.g. GTX):
Hull Identification Number (HIN):
The HIN is usually on the right side of the water craft's transom (back).
Do you wish to add a more detailed description of the Water Craft's features?
Where is the Water Craft currently located? (State/Province and Country, if appropriate)
Do you wish to promise that you are the legal owner(s) of the Aircraft?
Do you wish to promise that you are the legal owner(s) of the Appliance?
Do you wish to promise that you are the legal owner(s) of the Electronics?
Do you wish to promise that you are the legal owner(s) of the Firearms?
Do you wish to promise that you are the legal owner(s) of the Furniture?
Do you wish to promise that you are the legal owner(s) of the Motor Vehicle?
Do you wish to promise that you are the legal owner(s) of the Power Tool?
Do you wish to promise that you are the legal owner(s) of the Water Craft?
Do you wish to promise that you are the legal owner(s) of the property?
Are there any loans or claims against the Aircraft?
Are there any loans or claims against the Appliance?
Are there any loans or claims against the Electronics?
Are there any loans or claims against the Firearms?
Are there any loans or claims against the Furniture?
Are there any loans or claims against the Motor Vehicle?
Are there any loans or claims against the Water Craft?
Are there any loans or claims against the Power Tool?
Are there any loans or claims against the property?
Describe the loans and/or claims here:
E.g. A $500 lien has been registered against the lawnmower by Richard Smith of 123 Oak St., Birmingham, Alabama.
Will the loans and/or claims be resolved in the near future?
Loans and/or claims will be resolved within how many days?
Do you wish to warrant that the Water Craft will be free of mechanical defects for a specified period?
How many days will the mechanical warranty last?
Additional Clauses:
How many additional clauses do you wish to add?
First additional clause:
Second additional clause:
Third additional clause:
Fourth additional clause:
Fifth additional clause:
Date of Transaction, if known:
Do you know when the transaction will take place?
Unknown January February March April May June July August September October November December
Day of Month:
Unknown 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Unknown 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
Signatures Required:
To ensure the validity of this Bill of Sale, we recommend getting it signed by one or more witnesses and a notary public.
If a notary public will be present, you will be able to choose between a signature and a notarial acknowledgement. In most cases, a signature is sufficient. If you are unsure about your specific requirements, remember that it is better to go beyond what is needed than to find out later that important information is missing.
Will the Buyer(s) be signing?
How many witnesses will be present?
Will a notary public be present?
Will the notary be giving a notarial acknowledgement?
Free Bangladeshi Bill of Sale Templates
We strongly recommend obtaining an attorney reviewed Bill of Sale directly from us.
Bill of Sale - Goods
Instructions for free Bill of Sale templates:
Bill of Sale for Goods - Immediate Transaction
1. THE PARTIES TO THIS AGREEMENT ARE:
Legal Names:
BUYER:
2. DESCRIPTION OF GOODS BEING SOLD:
The Seller guarantees that they are the true and lawful owner of the above described Goods;
The Seller guarantees that the goods are free and clear of all encumbrances, liens and any and all legal claims;
The Seller warrants to indemnify and hold the Buyer harmless from any and all adverse claims arising from the sale or removal of the Goods;
The Seller gives no warranty or guarantee other than those specified above;
The Buyer admits having inspected the goods to their satisfaction;
The goods are sold As-Is and the Seller shall not be liable for any defects whatsoever;
The Purchase Price is the sum of ________ which was received in full by the Seller.
Signed at ______________on this ___ day of January, 2022.
Seller: ______________________
Witness: ____________________
Buyer: ______________________
This document was acknowledged before me on this ___ day of January 2022 by _______________________
Signature of Notary Public: ______________________
My commission expires: ______________________
Type of Vehicle:
Make and Color:
Odometer Reading:
The Seller guarantees that they are the true and lawful owner of the above-described vehicle and that it is free and clear of all encumbrances, liens and any and all legal claims.
The Seller warrants that at the date of execution of this agreement there are no licensing fees or fines or other penalties outstanding against the registration of the above-mentioned vehicle.
NO WARRANTIES OR GUARANTEES:
The Seller gives no warranty or guarantee other than those specified in within this agreement
The vehicle is sold "As-Is" and the seller shall not be liable for any defects whatsoever.
The Buyer admits having inspected the vehicle to his/her satisfaction and that no guarantees or warranties of any nature were expressed or implied by the Seller regarding the condition or quality of the vehicle.
LEGAL AGE:
The Parties are of legal age and legally competent to enter into this agreement.
TRANSFER OF OWNERSHIP AND COSTS:
The Parties agree to sign all documents necessary to transfer ownership of the vehicle from the Seller onto the name of the Buyer within 14 (FOURTEEN) days of execution of this agreement.
The Buyer shall be liable for all costs relating to the registration of the vehicle and any and all other associated thereof.
The Purchase price is the sum of ______________________
The Purchase price is to be paid in full by bank certified check
Ownership of the vehicle will only pass onto the Buyer once the payment to the Seller has cleared and the vehicle has been delivered to the Buyer.
The Seller acknowledges that a deposit in the sum of _____________ was received on _____________ 20____.
The Buyer agrees that the balance of the Purchase price in the sum of ________________ must be paid by ______________ 20____.
The Parties agree that the deposit is non-refundable. Should the balance of the Purchase price not be paid by the date specified above, the deposit will be forfeited and both parties will be relieved of all claims and obligations with respect to this agreement.
Signed at ______________________ on this ____ day of January, 2022
SELLER: ______________________________
WITNESS: ___________________________
BUYER: _______________________________
For maximum legal protection, obtain a lawyer reviewed Bill of Sale directly from us. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 8,101 |
3 Stocks to Buy for a Black Swan Market Crash
We can account for regular market corrections and even the occasional bear market like we're seeing now. However, a black swan market crash is impossible to predict and can have a devastating impact on one's portfolio.
Black swan events are not fun and they do not simply look like a "sale" in the stock market.
As defined by Investopedia, "a black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterized by their extreme rarity, severe impact, and the widespread insistence they were obvious in hindsight."
Simply put, a black swan market crash is a destructive outcome with devastating effects. However, over time it does provide savvy, unlevered investors with an opportunity to buy quality stocks at a discount. Let's look at a handful of stocks investors may want to flock to in a hypothetical black swan market event.
AAPL Apple $173.03
QQQ Invesco QQQ Trust Series $332.28
BRK.B Berkshire Hathaway $306.65
Source: View Apart / Shutterstock.com
As generic as it may be, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has to be atop our buy list in the event of a black swan market crash. Not only is the company the biggest public company in the world, but it's the top holding in the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq.
It's got immense cash flow and robust revenue. In 2021, Apple generated more than $365 billion in sales. It buys back an immense amount of stock and its balance sheet is more powerful than many individual countries. Not to mention, the company's Services unit continues to hum along nicely.
Its trailing 12-month revenue clocks in at $77.2 billion, while its gross margins are double Apple's Products unit. Further, Services is growing roughly three times faster than the Products unit.
Put it all together and we have a hugely profitable unit within the company that's outpacing the growth of its traditional business. That's how investors justify owning the stock, even at what some investors consider a higher valuation.
Plus, it's the best-performing FAANG stock in 2022 — and also trumps Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). That shows that even in times of trouble, investors are willing to buy this name.
Invesco QQQ ETF (QQQ)
Source: kenary820 / Shutterstock
It may seem lame for investors to pick an ETF, but if we really do get hit by a black swan market crash, diversity can be our best friend. However, when it comes to picking winners in the ETF world, I really like the Invesco QQQ Trust Series (NASDAQ:QQQ).
Coming into 2022, the QQQ has rallied in 17 of the last 19 years. One of those years was 2008, while the other — 2018 — was a loss of less than 1%. That compares to 15 out of 19 up-years for the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY), which for the record, is still quite good.
Second, the QQQ outperformed the SPY the last time we did see a black swan event (in 2020). The QQQ suffered a peak-to-trough decline of 30.5% vs. the SPY, which suffered a 35.6% decline.
Further, the QQQ rallied 147.8% off its March 2020 low to its all-time high, while the SPY "only" rallied 119.9%. So not only was there less downside in the QQQ, but there was more upside as well.
The QQQ is up 393% over the last 10 years and 130% over the last five. That compares to five- and 10-year gains of 203% and 73% for the SPY, respectively.
Lastly, its got strong components. Apple holds a 13% weighting, while Microsoft sits at more than 10%. More than 50% of its weighting is in its top 10 holdings and many of these names have strong cash flow and powerful balance sheets.
Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A, BRK.B)
Source: Jonathan Weiss / Shutterstock.com
Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.A, NYSE:BRK.B) is a conglomerate comprised of public stocks, private companies and exclusive deals. Berkshire is run by Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and other prudent managers. Not only would shares of Berkshire be a great deal amid a sharp, broad-market selloff, but Berkshire would go on a buyer spree itself finding the best deals in the market.
Coming into 2022, it had more than $145 billion in cash and short-term investments. As of the most recent quarter, Berkshire still holds more than $100 billion. It's got enormous businesses in freight, insurance, energy and more. Its public holdings are enormous, while Buffett can negotiate impressive deals regular investors cannot get.
For instance, the 100,000 preferred shares he has from Occidental Petroleum (NYSE:OXY) after helping it orchestrate a takeover of Anadarko Petroleum — valued at $100,000 apiece, or $10 billion in total that pays an 8% annual dividend. Or how about the preferred stock deals it got in companies like Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) or Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS)?
Berkshire isn't perfect, but it's a low-valuation, high-functioning asset to buy on any extreme dips.
On the date of publication, Bret Kenwell did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.
Bret Kenwell is the manager and author of Future Blue Chips and is on Twitter @BretKenwell.
3 Quantum Computing Stocks to Buy Now OR You'll Be Kicking Yourself Later
7 Tech Stocks Every Smart Investor Should Own in 2023
Is Carvana (CVNA) Stock a Buy or Sell? Here's My Call. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 3,032 |
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Margaret Satterthwaite '99 has engaged in human rights work in places such as Haiti, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, the United States, and Yemen.
Philip Alston is the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
Ryan Goodman's work makes significant contributions to the law of armed conflict, human rights law, and US national security law.
All Areas of Study
In the Name of Dignity
States today face supranational scrutiny with respect to how they treat individuals within their own territories, including their own citizens. Whether this scrutiny occurs in the United Nations or in human rights courts, international human rights regimes challenge the very conception of "inter-state" law.
NYU School of Law prepares students to work in this growing arena by offering a wide range of courses and clinics taught by faculty in the vanguard of human rights work, including Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Margaret Satterthwaite '99, whose interdisciplinary work involving using information graphics to tell human rights stories received a MacArthur Foundation grant, and Ryan Goodman, an interdisciplinary scholar and an editor-in-chief of Just Security, whose work makes significant contributions to human rights law.
The Robert and Helen Bernstein Institute for Human Rights promotes cutting-edge scholarship, advocacy, and education on human rights issues, and serves as a coordinating hub for existing human rights work at NYU, including the Center for Human Rights & Global Justice and the US-Asia Law Institute. Students pursuing human rights work will also find guaranteed summer funding and post-graduate fellowships in prominent nonprofits. The LLM in International Legal Studies also offers opportunities for further development in this area. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 106 |
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SEM and TEM ...\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (7MB)\n\u2022 (2002)\nThe purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of moderate physical activity (following the CDC\/ACSM recommendation) on the resting level of fat oxidation. It was hypothesized that a 30-minute treadmill walk at 50% ...\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (3MB)\n\u2022 (1992)\nThe rate of metabolism and recirculation contributes to the rate of excretion and to concentration in the circulation. Steroids are substrates for mixed function oxidases (MFO). Enterohepatic circulation (EHC) of estrogens ...\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (5MB)\n\u2022 (1956)\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (3MB)\n\u2022 (1954)\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (3MB)\n\u2022 (1965)\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (4MB)\n\u2022 (2005)\nZhang and Stout (1999) have demonstrated that the unidimensional ability composite of a multidimensional test to be a standardized linear combination of multiple abilities. Both simulated test data and real ACT test data ...\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (3MB)\n\u2022 (1996)\nThe ultrasonic speed and attenuation coefficient of three muscle samples were measured in-vitro as a function of temperature and frequency. The sarcomere length of each of these samples was also determined. The three muscle ...\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (8MB)\n\u2022 (2007)\nThe Schrodinger equation, in a real space k\u00b7p Hamiltonian formation, is solved using the finite element method to study effects of edge and screw dislocations on optical properties in GaN. Energy levels and corresponding ...\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (4MB)\n\u2022 (1977)\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (5MB)\n\u2022 (1962)\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (4MB)\n\u2022 (1979)\nSystematic low-temperature measurements of the thermal conductivity, specific heat, dielectric constant, and temperature-dependent ultrasound velocity have been made on a single piece of vitreous silica. These measurements ...\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (5MB)\n\u2022 (2014-05-30)\nThe positive growth response of maize ears to nitrate supplementation declines during late vegetative development, whereas ammonia addition continues to promote ear growth through the reproductive phase. The underlying ...\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (2MB)\n\u2022 (1986)\nOxynitride glasses in the Ba-Si-Al-O-N system which were clear, homogeneous, and free of metallic inclusions were produced using gel-derived oxide glass batches and electronic-grade Si(,3)N(,4). Nitrogen was found to act ...\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (9MB)\n\u2022 (1988)\nA fundamental investigation of the potential of nitroxides and O$\\sb2$ for enhancement of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast in vivo is presented. The effect of these species on proton relaxation in both aqueous ...\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (5MB)\n\u2022 (2004)\nNatural auditory scenes, like frog choruses, comprise multiple sound sources like individual vocalizations and background noise that overlap in the time- and frequency domains. Detection of sound in such a background is ...\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (4MB)\n\u2022 (2012-05-22)\nThe goal of this research is to investigate the effects of noise on the pull-in dynamics of a micro-electromechanical switch. We take into account thermal noise and noise present in the voltage source. Thermal noise is ...\n\napplication\/pdf\n\nPDF (593kB)","date":"2016-02-10 15:23:25","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.5010823607444763, \"perplexity\": 8547.265319314}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.3, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 5, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2016-07\/segments\/1454701159654.65\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20160205193919-00143-ip-10-236-182-209.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
drop table if exists t1;
drop table if exists t2;
drop table if exists t3;
CREATE TABLE t1 (s1 STRING COLLATE utf8_en_ci);
CREATE TABLE t2 (s2 STRING COLLATE utf8_en_cs);
CREATE TABLE t3 (s3 STRING COLLATE utf8_tr_cs);
insert into t1 values ('a');
insert into t2 values ('a');
insert into t2 values ('b');
insert into t3 values ('c');
SELECT CONCAT(s1,'') FROM t1
UNION
SELECT CONCAT(s2,'') FROM t2
UNION
SELECT s3 FROM t3;
SELECT s3 FROM t3
UNION
SELECT CONCAT(s2,'') FROM t2
UNION
SELECT CONCAT(s1,'') FROM t1;
drop t1;
drop t2;
drop t3;
-- scenario2 for binary collation
CREATE TABLE t1 (s1 STRING COLLATE euckr_bin);
CREATE TABLE t2 (s2 STRING COLLATE utf8_bin);
CREATE TABLE t3 (s3 STRING COLLATE iso88591_bin);
insert into t1 values ('a');
insert into t2 values ('a');
insert into t2 values ('b');
insert into t3 values ('c');
SELECT CONCAT(s1,'') FROM t1
UNION
SELECT CONCAT(s2,'') FROM t2
UNION
SELECT s3 FROM t3;
SELECT s3 FROM t3
UNION
SELECT CONCAT(s2,'') FROM t2
UNION
SELECT CONCAT(s1,'') FROM t1;
drop t1;
drop t2;
drop t3;
| {
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Q: kubernetes PersistentVolumeClaim not bound, but volume is bound I'm new to Kubernetes and I'm following the GKE Elasticsearch 5 Getting Started doc. I cannot get the cluster to start when using the PersistentVolumeClaim and the configMap (mounting local, my laptop, path to containers). It works when the configMap is removed.
kubectl version:
Client Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"7", GitVersion:"v1.7.0", GitCommit:"d3ada0119e776222f11ec7945e6d860061339aad", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2017-06-29T23:15:59Z", GoVersion:"go1.8.3", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"darwin/amd64"}
Server Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"6", GitVersion:"v1.6.4", GitCommit:"d6f433224538d4f9ca2f7ae19b252e6fcb66a3ae", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2017-05-19T18:33:17Z", GoVersion:"go1.7.5", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}
kubectl describe pod some-elasticsearch outputs the error:
[SchedulerPredicates failed due to persistentvolumeclaim "elasticsearchdata" not found, which is unexpected., SchedulerPredicates failed due to persistentvolumeclaim "elasticsearchdata" not found.
[SchedulerPredicates failed due to PersistentVolumeClaim is not bound: "elasticsearchdata", which is unexpected., SchedulerPredicates failed due to PersistentVolumeClaim is not bound
The volume is shown as bound. Any suggestions? Here's my pod.yaml:
metadata:
name: some-elasticsearch
labels:
name: some-elasticsearch
spec:
containers:
- image: launcher.gcr.io/google/elasticsearch5
name: elasticsearch
volumeMounts:
- name: elasticsearchdata
mountPath: /usr/share/elasticsearch/data
- name: elasticsearchconfig
mountPath: /usr/share/elasticsearch/config
volumes:
- name: elasticsearchdata
persistentVolumeClaim:
claimName: elasticsearchdata
- name: elasticsearchconfig
configMap:
name: elasticsearchconfig
---
# Request a persistent volume from the cluster using a Persistent Volume Claim.
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
name: elasticsearchdata
annotations:
volume.alpha.kubernetes.io/storage-class: default
spec:
accessModes: [ReadWriteOnce]
resources:
requests:
storage: 5Gi
If I comment out the elasticsearchconfig, the cluster starts successfully:
- name: elasticsearchconfig
mountPath: /usr/share/elasticsearch/config
- name: elasticsearchconfig
configMap:
name: elasticsearchconfig
Output from kubectl describe pvc elasticsearchdata:
Name: elasticsearchdata
Namespace: default
StorageClass: standard
Status: Bound
Volume: pvc-52f0d3d2-6d57-11e7-94f6-42010af002a5
Labels: <none>
Annotations: pv.kubernetes.io/bind-completed=yes
pv.kubernetes.io/bound-by-controller=yes
volume.alpha.kubernetes.io/storage-class=default
volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-provisioner=kubernetes.io/gce-pd
Capacity: 5Gi
Access Modes: RWO
Events:
FirstSeen LastSeen Count From SubObjectPath Type Reason Message
--------- -------- ----- ---- ------------- -------- ------ -------
2m 2m 1 persistentvolume-controller Normal ProvisioningIgnoreAlpha both "volume.alpha.kubernetes.io/storage-class" annotation and storageClassName are present, using storageClassName
2m 2m 1 persistentvolume-controller Normal ProvisioningSucceeded Successfully provisioned volume pvc-52f0d3d2-6d57-11e7-94f6-42010af002a5 using kubernetes.io/gce-pd
I want to have persistent storage and need to load a custom elasticsearch.yml from the elasticsearchconfig configMap.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 1,318 |
The Fulbourn Swifts housing development is one of the largest and most successful nest-boxing projects in the country
This was a very successful year for the Fulbourn Swifts Group and the fine weather helped to make it a great year for the local swifts as well. Increased publicity enabled us to recruit new members for the survey and to significantly raise awareness about swifts in the village. Our main focus was again on surveying swifts on the Swifts housing development, which is approaching completion, but also we were able to monitor the small colony located at St Vigor's Church. In June a BBC crew filmed the survey team in action for an item on swifts in the regional television programme 'Urban Jungle'.
The survey team pictured in front of the Fulbourn Life Wall
On the Swifts Development, an estate of 1960s system built houses, home to a large colony of swifts, has been demolished to be replaced by new homes with internal and external swift nest boxes.
At the start of the swift season the third part (Phase 2a) of the Development had been completed and building work had commenced on the fourth and final part. One original block of five houses will remain after the completion of the redevelopment and these still provide nest sites for swifts. [You can read background information in Fulbourn Community Swift Survey 2012 and Swifts in Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire.]
In March we mounted a display at Fulbourn Community Market, followed by publishing an item in the Parish Council Newsletter and by distributing a flyer to all homes on the Swifts Development. The latter was particularly successful as we recruited several local residents, who participated in the survey, and during the season others telephoned or sent e-mails to report observations made from their own homes.
We met on site for the survey every Wednesday evening from the beginning of May to late August, but individuals made observations on many other evenings during the summer. There were usually between 5 and 10 observers, but numbers peaked at 17 to coincide with the presence of the BBC film crew!
Swifts moved into nest boxes on these newly completed houses'
Our first two swifts of the season were seen at the survey on 1 May and due to the cool weather the numbers were slow to pick up with double figures not being recorded until mid-month.
The numbers flying overhead varied throughout June depending on the weather with a maximum of 30 being observed mid-month. Flying numbers improved significantly during the warm weather of July, presumably with a large influx of prospecting young birds.
Peak numbers of 50+ were seen around mid-month with low level screaming parties of up to 20 birds providing a wonderful spectacle. In the first few days of August there were still around 30 birds flying overhead, but numbers dropped well into single figures within a week. The last low level screaming party was observed on 7 August. However, swifts were still feeding young in at least five nests up to mid-month and were still active at two sites on 21 August. The last swift of the season was seen on 28 August entering a nest site in a block of old houses, which is due for demolition.
At the start of the season there were 227 swift nest boxes on site – 139 internal and 88 external – and it was a significant challenge for us to successfully monitor all of these, as is demonstrated by our observation on 7 August of an adult swift feeding young in a box where we had not noticed any activity before!
This year, swifts were observed using 66 out of 139 internal nest boxes, 9 out of 88 external nest boxes and 5 sites in the remaining old block – 80 sites in total. We estimate that there were 58 potential breeding pairs – 51 in internal boxes, 3 in external boxes and 4 in the old block. In 2012 we saw 51 locations in use and we estimated that there were 32 breeding pairs, so it appears that 2013 was a great year for Fulbourn swifts and the outlook for the colony looks very bright!
A young swift viewing the Fulbourn streetscape in mid-July
In the hot weather of mid-July we observed several young swifts at nest box entrance holes, and around this time two young swifts were found out of the nest at different locations and were taken to Judith Wakelam, who successfully raised them to fledging. One of these had even survived being picked up by a cat!
Over the last few years swifts have colonised each of the areas of new development in turn usually after a delay of one season for prospecting, but this year a few pairs moved into nest boxes in houses that had been built over the winter.
The major preference was again for the internal boxes although we saw one additional breeding pair using the external Schwegler boxes this year with prospectors in another 6, which is encouraging for next year. We have previously noted the presence of starlings in some Schwegler boxes but we have not observed any direct interaction between starlings and swifts. Last year we reported attempts to make these boxes less attractive to starlings (you can read background information at Fulbourn update) and they successfully nested in at least one of these modified boxes in 2013.
Swifts started using these unusually located boxes this year
Most of the internal boxes in the earlier phases of the new housing development are located high up on the gable ends of either two storey houses or three storey flats and many of these are already occupied by breeding pairs, so it was interesting to observe swifts this year using a set of three boxes located just behind a lamp post on the gable end of a single storey house (see picture). The nest box entrances are around 4.5m above ground level. Young swifts were raised in the left hand box (we heard them up to 21 August) and the middle box was also used by swifts over a period of weeks during which time a sparrow also showed interest! Residents have reported sightings of sparrows regularly using some of the internal swift nest boxes.
This sparrow was visiting a box being used by swifts!
As mentioned above, we monitored the small swift colony at St Vigor's Church where four nest sites were used for the third year running. Activity around the Churchyard reached a peak in mid-July with some wonderful flying displays of over 20 birds right in the heart of the village. The group flying here are supplemented by birds from the nearby small colony on the Old Manor House, which was not monitored this year.
Over the last two years 30 swift nest boxes have been installed on houses in various areas of the village away from the new housing development and we remain optimistic of recording our first use of any of these in 2014.
The builders are now working well into the last phase of the Swifts Development so by the start of the new swift season there could be up to 50 additional swift boxes available on site for us to monitor. In spring 2014 we intend to survey breeding starlings in the external boxes to increase our understanding of the potential for impact on swifts attempting to breed in them.
We will continue with our publicity within the village to maintain awareness of the project and to ensure that we have good participation in the 2014 survey. If any Fulbourn residents reading this would be interested in putting up a nest box or taking part in the 2014 survey, then please contact us at fulbournforum@gmail.com. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 1,498 |
_About the Book_
**Jack Reacher, adrift in the hellish heat of a Texas summer.**
Looking for a lift through the vast empty landscape. A woman stops, and offers a ride. She is young, rich and beautiful.
**But her husband's in jail. When he comes out, he's going to kill her.**
Her family's hostile, she can't trust the cops, and the lawyers won't help. She is entangled in a web of lies and prejudice, hatred and murder.
**Jack Reacher never could resist a lady in distress.**
## Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
About the Author
Have You Read Them All?
Jack Reacher
Copyright
#
ECHO BURNING
Lee Child
People think that writing is a lonely, solitary trade. They're wrong. It's a team game, and I'm lucky enough to have charming and talented people on my side everywhere I'm published. Accordingly, if you have ever worked on or sold one of my books, this one is dedicated to you. You're too numerous to mention individually, but too important not to mention at all.
ONE
There were three watchers, two men and a boy. They were using telescopes, not field glasses. It was a question of distance. They were almost a mile from their target area, because of the terrain. There was no closer cover. It was low, undulating country, burned khaki by the sun, grass and rock and sandy soil alike. The nearest safe concealment was the broad dip they were in, a bone-dry gulch scraped out a million years ago by a different climate, when there had been rain and ferns and rushing rivers.
The men lay prone in the dust with the early heat on their backs, their telescopes at their eyes. The boy scuttled around on his knees, fetching water from the cooler, watching for waking rattlesnakes, logging comments in a notebook. They had arrived before first light in a dusty pick-up truck, the long way round, across the empty land from the west. They had thrown a dirty tarpaulin over the truck and pegged it down with rocks. They had eased forward to the rim of the dip and settled in, raising their telescopes as the low morning sun dawned to the east behind the red house almost a mile away. This was Friday, their fifth consecutive morning, and they were low on conversation.
'Time?' one of the men asked. His voice was nasal, the effect of keeping one eye open and the other eye shut.
The boy checked his watch.
'Six fifty,' he answered.
'Any moment now,' the man with the telescope said.
The boy opened his book and prepared to make the same notes he had made four times before.
'Kitchen light on,' the man said.
The boy wrote it down. _Six fifty, kitchen light on_. The kitchen faced them, looking west away from the morning sun, so it stayed dark even after dawn.
'On her own?' the boy asked.
'Same as always,' the second man said, squinting.
_Maid prepares breakfast_ , the boy wrote. _Target still in bed_. The sun rose, inch by inch. It jacked itself higher into the sky and pulled the shadows shorter and shorter. The red house had a tall chimney coming out of the kitchen wing like the finger on a sundial. The shadow it made swung and shortened and the heat on the watchers' shoulders built higher. Seven o'clock in the morning, and it was already hot. By eight, it would be burning. By nine, it would be fearsome. And they were there all day, until dark, when they could slip away unseen.
'Bedroom drapes opening,' the second man said. 'She's up and about.'
The boy wrote it down. _Seven oh-four, bedroom drapes open_.
'Now listen,' the first man said.
They heard the well pump kick in, very faintly from almost a mile away. A quiet mechanical click, and then a steady low drone.
'She's showering,' the man said.
The boy wrote it down. _Seven oh-six, target starts to shower_.
The men rested their eyes. Nothing was going to happen while she was in the shower. How could it? They lowered their telescopes and blinked against the brassy sun in their eyes. The well pump clicked off after six minutes. The silence sounded louder than the faint noise had. The boy wrote: _seven twelve, target out of shower_. The men raised their telescopes again.
'She's dressing, I guess,' the first man said.
The boy giggled. 'Can you see her naked?'
The second man was triangulated twenty feet to the south. He had the better view of the back of the house, where her bedroom window was.
'You're disgusting,' he said. 'You know that?'
The boy wrote: _seven fifteen, probably dressing_. Then: _Seven twenty, probably downstairs, probably eating breakfast_.
'She'll go back up, clean her teeth,' he said.
The man on the left shifted on his elbows.
'For sure,' he said. 'Prissy little thing like that.'
'She's closing her drapes again,' the man on the right said.
It was standard practice in the west of Texas, in the summer, especially if your bedroom faced south, like this one did. Unless you wanted to sleep the next night in a room hotter than a pizza oven.
'Stand by,' the man said. 'A buck gets ten she goes out to the barn now.'
It was a wager that nobody took, because so far four times out of four she had done exactly that, and watchers are paid to notice patterns.
'Kitchen door's open.'
The boy wrote: _seven twenty-seven, kitchen door opens_.
'Here she comes.'
She came out, dressed in a blue gingham dress which reached to her knees and left her shoulders bare. Her hair was tied back behind her head. It was still damp from the shower.
'What do you call that sort of a dress?' the boy asked.
'Halter,' the man on the left said.
_Seven twenty-eight, comes out, blue halter dress, goes to barn_ , the boy wrote.
She walked across the yard, short hesitant steps against the uneven ruts in the baked earth, maybe seventy yards. She heaved the barn door open and disappeared in the gloom inside.
The boy wrote: _seven twenty-nine, target in barn_.
'How hot is it?' the man on the left asked.
'Maybe a hundred degrees,' the boy said.
'There'll be a storm soon. Heat like this, there has to be.'
'Here comes her ride,' the man on the right said.
Miles to the south, there was a dust cloud on the road. A vehicle, making slow and steady progress north.
'She's coming back,' the man on the right said.
_Seven thirty-two, target comes out of barn_ , the boy wrote.
'Maid's at the door,' the man said.
The target stopped at the kitchen door and took her lunch box from the maid. It was bright blue plastic with a cartoon picture on the side. She paused for a second. Her skin was pink and damp from the heat. She leaned down to adjust her socks and then trotted out to the gate, through the gate, to the shoulder of the road. The school bus slowed and stopped and the door opened with a sound the watchers heard clearly over the faint rattle of the idling engine. The chrome handrails flashed once in the sun. The diesel exhaust hung and drifted in the hot still air. The target heaved her lunch box onto the step and grasped the bright rails and clambered up after it. The door closed again and the watchers saw her corn-coloured head bobbing along level with the base of the windows. Then the engine noise deepened and the gears caught and the bus moved away with a new cone of dust kicking up behind it.
_Seven thirty-six, target on bus to school_ , the boy wrote.
The road north was dead straight and he turned his head and watched the bus all the way until the heat on the horizon broke it up into a shimmering yellow mirage. Then he closed his notebook and secured it with a rubber band. Back at the red house, the maid stepped inside and closed the kitchen door. Nearly a mile away, the watchers lowered their telescopes and turned their collars up for protection from the sun.
Seven thirty-seven, Friday morning.
Seven thirty-eight.
Seven thirty-nine, more than three hundred miles to the north and east, Jack Reacher climbed out of his motel-room window. One minute earlier, he had been in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. One minute before that, he had opened the door of his room to check the morning temperature. He had left it open, and the closet just inside the entrance passageway was faced with mirrored glass, and there was a shaving mirror in the bathroom on a cantilevered arm, and by a freak of optical chance he caught sight of four men getting out of a car and walking toward the motel office. Pure luck, but a guy as vigilant as Jack Reacher gets lucky more times than the average.
The car was a police cruiser. It had a shield on the door, and because of the bright sunlight and the double reflection he could read it clearly. At the top it said _City Police_ , and then there was a fancy medallion in the middle with _Lubbock, Texas_ written underneath. All four men who got out were in uniform. They had bulky belts with guns and radios and nightsticks and handcuffs. Three of the men he had never seen before, but the fourth guy was familiar. The fourth guy was a tall heavyweight with a gelled blond brush-cut above a meaty red face. This morning the meaty red face was partially obscured by a glinting aluminium splint carefully taped over a shattered nose. His right hand was similarly bound up with a splint and bandages protecting a broken forefinger.
The guy had neither injury the night before. And Reacher had no idea the guy was a cop. He just looked like some idiot in a bar. Reacher had gone there because he'd heard the music was good, but it wasn't, so he had backed away from the band and ended up on a bar stool watching ESPN on a muted television fixed high on a wall. The place was crowded and noisy and he was wedged in a space with a woman on his right and the heavyweight guy with the brush-cut on his left. He got bored with the sports and turned round to watch the room. As he turned, he saw how the guy was eating.
The guy was wearing a white tank-top shirt and he was eating chicken wings. The wings were greasy and the guy was a slob. He was dripping chicken fat off his chin and off his fingers onto his shirt. There was a dark teardrop shape right between his pecs. It was growing and spreading into an impressive stain. But the best bar-room etiquette doesn't let you linger on such a sight, and the guy caught Reacher staring.
'Who you looking at?' he said.
It was said low and aggressively, but Reacher ignored it.
'Who you looking at?' the guy said again.
Reacher's experience was, they say it once, maybe nothing's going to happen. But they say it twice, then trouble's on the way. Fundamental problem is, they take a lack of response as evidence that you're worried. That they're winning. But then, they won't let you answer, anyway.
'You looking at me?' the guy said.
'No,' Reacher answered.
'Don't you be looking at me, boy,' the guy said.
The way he said _boy_ made Reacher think he was maybe a foreman in a lumber mill or a cotton operation. Whatever muscle work was done around Lubbock. Some kind of a traditional trade passed down through the generations. Certainly the word _cop_ never came to his mind. But then he was relatively new to Texas.
'Don't you look at me,' the guy said.
Reacher turned his head and looked at him. Not really to antagonize the guy. Just to size him up. Life is endlessly capable of surprises, so he knew one day he would come face to face with his physical equal. With somebody who might worry him. But he looked and saw this wasn't the day. So he just smiled and looked away again.
Then the guy jabbed him with his finger.
'I told you not to look at me,' he said, and jabbed.
It was a meaty forefinger and it was covered in grease. It left a definite mark on Reacher's shirt.
'Don't do that,' Reacher said.
The guy jabbed again.
'Or what?' he said. 'You want to make something out of it?'
Reacher looked down. Now there were two marks. The guy jabbed again. Three jabs, three marks. Reacher clamped his teeth. What were three greasy marks on a shirt? He started a slow count to ten. Then the guy jabbed again, before he even reached eight.
'You deaf?' Reacher said. 'I told you not to do that.'
'You want to do something about it?'
'No,' Reacher said. 'I really don't. I just want you to stop doing it, is all.'
The guy smiled. 'Then you're a yellow-bellied piece of shit.'
'Whatever,' Reacher said. 'Just keep your hands off me.'
'Or what? What you going to do?'
Reacher restarted his count. _Eight, nine_.
'You want to take this outside?' the guy asked.
_Ten_.
'Touch me again and you'll find out,' Reacher said. 'I warned you four times.'
The guy paused a second. Then, of course, he went for it again. Reacher caught the finger on the way in and snapped it at the first knuckle. Just folded it upward like he was turning a door handle. Then because he was irritated he leaned forward and headbutted the guy full in the face. It was a smooth move, well delivered, but it was backed off to maybe a half of what it might have been. No need to put a guy in a coma, over four grease marks on a shirt. He moved a pace to give the man room to fall, and backed into the woman on his right.
'Excuse me, ma'am,' he said.
The woman nodded vaguely, disoriented by the noise, concentrating on her drink, unaware of what was happening. The big guy thumped silently on the floorboards and Reacher used the sole of his shoe to roll him half onto his front. Then he nudged him under the chin with his toe to pull his head back and straighten his airway. The recovery position, paramedics call it. Stops you choking while you're out.
Then he paid for his drinks and walked back to his motel, and didn't give the guy another thought until he was at the bathroom mirror and saw him out and about in a cop's uniform. Then he thought hard, and as fast as he could.
He spent the first second calculating reflected angles and figuring _if I can see him, does that mean he can see me?_ The answer was yes, of course he can. If he was looking the right way, which he wasn't yet. He spent the next second mad at himself. He should have picked up the signs. They had been there. Who else would be poking at a guy built like him, except somebody with some kind of protected status? Some kind of imagined invulnerability? He should have picked up on it.
_So what to do?_ The guy was a cop on his own turf. And Reacher was an easily recognizable target. Apart from anything else he still had the four grease spots on his shirt, and a brand new bruise on his forehead. There were probably forensics people who could match its shape to the bones in the guy's nose.
_So what to do?_ An angry cop bent on revenge could cause trouble. A lot of trouble. A noisy public arrest, for sure, maybe some wild gunshots, definitely some four-on-one fun and games in an empty out-of-the-way cell down at the station house, where you can't fight back without multiplying your original legal problem. Then all kinds of difficult questions, because Reacher habitually carried no ID and nothing else at all except his toothbrush and a couple of thousand dollars cash in his pants pocket. So he would be regarded as a suspicious character. Almost certainly he'd be charged with attacking a law officer. That was probably a big deal in Texas. All kinds of witnesses would materialize to swear it was malicious and completely unprovoked. He could end up convicted and in the penitentiary, easy as anything. He could end up with seven-to-ten in some tough establishment. Which was definitely not number one on his wish list.
So discretion was going to be the better part of valour. He put his toothbrush in his pocket and walked through the room and opened the window. Unclipped the screen and dropped it to the ground. Climbed out and closed the window and rested the screen back in its frame and walked away across a vacant lot to the nearest street. Turned right and kept on walking until he was hidden by a low building. He looked for buses. There weren't any. He looked for taxis. Nothing doing. So he stuck out his thumb. He figured he had ten minutes to find a ride before they finished at the motels and started cruising the streets. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen at the outside.
Which meant it wasn't going to work. It couldn't work. Seven thirty-nine in the morning, the temperature was already over a hundred degrees. It was going to be impossible to get a ride at all. In heat like that no driver on the planet would open their door long enough for him to slide right in, never mind for any long prior discussions about destinations. So finding a getaway in time was going to be impossible. Absolutely impossible. He started planning alternatives, because he was so sure of it. But it turned out he was wrong. It turned out his whole day was a series of surprises.
There were three killers, two men and a woman. They were an out-of-state professional crew, based in Los Angeles, contactable through an intermediary in Dallas and a second cut-out in Vegas. They had been in business ten years, and they were very good at what they did, which was take care of problems anywhere in the Southwest and survive to get paid and do it over again as many times as anybody asked them to. Ten years, and never once a hint of a problem. A good team. Meticulous, inventive, perfectionist. As good as it gets, in their strange little world. And perfectly suited to it. They were bland, forgettable, white, anonymous. To see them together, they looked like the branch office of a photocopier company on its way to a sales convention.
Not that they were ever seen together, except by their victims. They travelled separately. One always drove and the other two flew, always by different routes. The driver was one of the men, because invisibility was their aim, and a woman driving a long distance alone was still slightly more memorable than a man. The car was always rented, always at LAX arrivals, which had the busiest rental counters in the world. It was always a generic family sedan, a mud-coloured nothing car. The licence and the credit card used to obtain it were always real, properly issued in a distant state to a person who had never existed. The driver would wait on the sidewalk and then line up when a busy flight was spilling out into baggage claim when he would be just one face among a hundred. He was small and dark and forgettable and had a rolling duffel and a carry-on and a harassed expression, same as everybody else.
He did the paperwork at the counter and rode the bus to the rental compound and found his allotted car. He dumped his bags in the trunk, waited at the exit check, and drove out into the glare. He spent forty minutes on the freeways, driving a wide aimless circle around the whole of the metropolitan area, making sure he wasn't followed. Then he ducked off into West Hollywood and stopped at a lock-up garage in an alley behind a lingerie salon. He left the motor running and opened the garage door and opened the trunk and swapped his rolling duffel and his carry-on for two big valises made of thick black nylon. One of them was very heavy. The heavy valise was the reason he was driving, not flying. It contained things best kept away from airport scanners.
He closed up the garage and rolled east on Santa Monica Boulevard and turned south on 101 and hooked east again on 10. Squirmed in his seat and settled in for the two-day drive all the way out to Texas. He wasn't a smoker, but he lit numerous cigarettes and held them between his fingers and flicked ash on the carpets, on the dash, on the wheel. He let the cigarettes burn out and crushed the butts in the ashtray. That way, the rental company would have to vacuum the car very thoroughly, and spray it with air freshener, and wipe down the vinyl with detailing fluid. That would eliminate every trace of him later, including his fingerprints.
The second man was on the move, too. He was taller and heavier and fairer, but there was nothing memorable about him. He joined the end-of-the-workday crush at LAX and bought a ticket to Atlanta. When he got there, he swapped his wallet for one of the five spares in his carry-on and a completely different man bought another ticket for Dallas-Fort Worth.
The woman travelled a day later. That was her privilege, because she was the team leader. She was closing in on middle age, medium-sized, medium-blonde. Nothing at all special about her, except she killed people for a living. She left her car in the LAX long-term parking, which wasn't dangerous because her car was registered to a Pasadena infant who had died of the measles thirty years previously. She rode the shuttle bus to the terminal and used a forged MasterCard to buy her ticket, and a genuine New York driver's licence for photo-ID at the gate. She boarded her plane about the time the driver was starting his second day on the road.
After his second stop for gas on the first day, he had made a detour into the New Mexico hills and found a quiet dusty shoulder where he squatted in the cool thin air and changed the car's California plates for Arizona plates, which he took from the heavier valise. He wound his way back to the highway and drove another hour, then pulled off the road and found a motel. He paid cash, used a Tucson address, and let the desk clerk copy the Arizona plate number onto the registration form.
He slept six hours with the room air on low and was back on the road early. Made it to Dallas-Fort Worth at the end of the second day and parked in the airport long-term lot. Took his valises with him and used the shuttle bus to departures. Took the moving stairs straight down to arrivals and lined up at the Hertz counter. Hertz, because they rent Fords, and he needed a Crown Victoria.
He did the paperwork, with Illinois ID. Rode the bus to the Hertz lot and found his car. It was the plain-jane Crown Vic, in steel blue metallic, neither light nor dark. He was happy with it. He heaved his bags into the trunk and drove to a motel near the new ballpark on the road from Fort Worth to Dallas. Checked in with the same Illinois ID, ate, and slept a few hours. He woke early and met his two partners in the fierce morning heat outside the motel at exactly the same moment Jack Reacher first stuck out his thumb, more than four hundred miles away in Lubbock.
Second surprise after the cop showing up was he got a ride within three minutes. He wasn't even sweating yet. His shirt was still dry. Third surprise was the driver who stopped for him was a woman. Fourth and biggest surprise of all was the direction their subsequent conversation took.
He had been hitching rides for the best part of twenty-five years, in more countries than he could easily recall, and three minutes was about the shortest interval between sticking out his thumb and climbing into a car he could remember. As a mode of transportation, hitching rides was dying out. That was his conclusion, based on a lot of experience. Commercial drivers had insurance problems with it, and private citizens were getting worried about it. Because who knew what kind of a psycho you were? And in Reacher's case, it was worse than the average, especially right then. He wasn't some dapper little guy, neat and inoffensive. He was a giant, six-five, heavily built, close to two hundred and fifty pounds. Up close, he was usually scruffy, usually unshaven, and his hair was usually a mess. People worried about him. They stayed away from him. And now he had the fresh new bruise on his forehead. Which was why he was surprised about the three minutes.
And why he was surprised about the woman driver. There's usually a pecking order, based on some kind of subconscious assessment of risk. Top of the list, a young girl will get a ride from an older man easiest of all, because where's the threat in that? Although now, with some of the young girls turning into scam artists wanting a hundred bucks in exchange for dropping fake molestation claims, even that is getting harder. And whatever, right down there at the bottom of the list is a big scruffy guy getting a ride from a neat slender woman in an expensive coupé. But it happened. Within three minutes.
He was hurrying south and west of the motel strip, stunned by the heat, hard to see in the jagged morning shadows, his left thumb jammed out urgently, when she pulled over at his side with the wet hiss of wide tyres on hot pavement. It was a big white car and the sun on the hood dazzled him. He turned blindly and she buzzed her far window down. Seven forty-two, Friday morning.
'Where to?' she called, like she was a cab driver, not a private citizen.
'Anywhere,' he said.
He regretted it, instantly. It was a dumb thing to say, because to have no specific destination usually makes things worse. They think you're some kind of an aimless drifter, which makes them suspicious, and makes them worried they might never get rid of you. Makes them worried you'll want to ride all the way home with them. But this woman just nodded.
'OK,' she said. 'I'm headed down past Pecos.'
He paused a beat, surprised. Her head was ducked down, her face tilted up, looking out at him through the window.
'Great,' he said.
He stepped off the kerb and opened the door and slid inside. The interior was freezing cold. She had the air roaring on maximum and the seat was leather and it felt like a block of ice. She buzzed the window up again with the button on her side as he swung the door shut behind him.
'Thanks,' he said. 'You don't know how much I appreciate this.'
She said nothing. Just made some kind of all-purpose dismissive gesture away from him as she craned to look over her shoulder at the traffic stream behind her. People have their reasons for giving rides, all of them different. Maybe they hitched a lot when they were younger and now they're settled and comfortable they want to put back what they took out. Like a circular thing. Maybe they have charitable natures. Or maybe they're just lonely and want a little conversation.
But if this woman wanted conversation she was in no kind of a hurry to get it started. She just waited for a couple of trucks to labour past and pulled out behind them without a word. Reacher glanced around inside the car. It was a Cadillac, two doors, but as long as a boat, and very fancy. Maybe a couple of years old, but as clean as a whistle. The leather was the colour of old bones and the glass was tinted like an empty bottle of French wine. There was a pocketbook and a small briefcase thrown on the back seat. The pocketbook was anonymous and black, maybe plastic. The briefcase was made from weathered cowhide, the sort of thing that already looks old when you buy it. It was zipped open and there was a lot of folded paper stuffed in it, the sort of thing you see in a lawyer's office.
'Move the seat back, if you want,' the woman said. 'Give yourself room.'
'Thanks,' he said again.
He found switches on the door shaped like seat cushions. He fiddled with them and quiet motors eased him rearward and reclined his backrest. Then he lowered the seat, to make himself inconspicuous from outside. The motors whirred. It was like being in a dentist's chair.
'That looks better,' she said. 'More comfortable for you.'
Her own chair was tight up to the wheel, because she was small. He twisted in his seat so he could look her over without staring straight at her. She was short and slim, dark-skinned, fine-boned. Altogether a small person. Maybe a hundred pounds, maybe thirty years old. Long black wavy hair, dark eyes, small white teeth visible behind a tense half-smile. Mexican, he guessed, but not the type of Mexican who swims the Rio Grande looking for a better life. This woman's ancestors had enjoyed a better life for hundreds of years. That was pretty clear. It was in her genes. She looked like some kind of Aztec royalty. She was wearing a simple cotton dress, printed with a pale pattern. Not much to it, but it looked expensive. It was sleeveless and finished above her knees. Her arms and legs were dark and smooth, like they had been polished.
'So, where are you headed?' she asked.
Then she paused and smiled wider. 'No, I already asked you that. You didn't seem very clear about where you want to go.'
Her accent was pure American, maybe more western than southern. She was steering two-handed, and he could see rings on her fingers. There was a slim wedding band, and a platinum thing with a big diamond.
'Anywhere,' Reacher said. 'Anywhere I end up, that's where I want to go.'
She paused and smiled again. 'Are you running away from something? Have I picked up a dangerous fugitive?'
Her smile meant it wasn't a serious question, but he found himself thinking maybe it ought to have been. It wasn't too far-fetched, in the circumstances. She was taking a risk. The sort of risk that was killing the art of hitching rides, as a mode of transportation.
'I'm exploring,' he said.
'Exploring Texas? They already discovered it.'
'Like a tourist,' he said.
'But you don't look like a tourist. The tourists we get wear polyester leisure suits and come in a bus.'
She smiled again as she said it. She looked good when she smiled. She looked assured and self-possessed, and refined to the point of elegance. An elegant Mexican woman, wearing an expensive dress, clearly comfortable with talking. Driving a Cadillac. He was suddenly aware of his short answers, and his hair and his stubble and his stained shirt and his creased khaki pants. And the big bruise on his forehead.
'You live around here?' he asked, because she'd said _the tourists we get_ , and he felt he needed something to say.
'I live south of Pecos,' she said. 'More than three hundred miles from here. I told you, that's where I'm headed.'
'Never been there,' he said.
She went quiet and waited at a light. Took off again through a wide junction and hugged the right lane. He watched her thigh move as she pressed on the gas pedal. Her bottom lip was caught between her teeth. Her eyes were narrowed. She was tense about something, but she had it under control.
'So, did you explore Lubbock?' she asked.
'I saw the Buddy Holly statue.'
He saw her glance down at the radio, like she was thinking _this guy likes music, maybe I should put some on_.
'You like Buddy Holly?' she asked.
'Not really,' Reacher said. 'Too tame for me.'
She nodded at the wheel. 'I agree. I think Ritchie Valens was better. He was from Lubbock, too.'
He nodded back. 'I saw him in the Walk of Fame.'
'How long were you in Lubbock?'
'A day.'
'And now you're moving on.'
'That's the plan.'
'To wherever,' she said.
'That's the plan,' he said again.
They passed the city limit. There was a small metal sign on a pole on the sidewalk. He smiled to himself. _City Police_ , the shield on the cop car had said. He turned his head and watched danger disappear behind him.
The two men sat in the front of the Crown Victoria, with the tall fair man driving to give the small dark man a break. The woman sat in the back. They rolled out of the motel lot and picked up speed on I-20, heading west, toward Fort Worth, away from Dallas. Nobody spoke. Thinking about the vast interior of Texas was oppressing them. The woman had read a guide book in preparation for the mission which pointed out that the state makes up fully 7 per cent of America's land mass and is bigger than most European countries. That didn't impress her. Everybody knew all that standard-issue Texas-is-real-big bullshit. Everybody always has. But the guide book also pointed out that side to side Texas is wider than the distance between New York and Chicago. That information had some impact. And it underlined why they were facing such a long drive, just to get from one nowhere interior location to another.
But the car was quiet and cool and comfortable, and it was as good a place to relax as any motel room would be. They had a little time to kill, after all.
The woman slowed and made a shallow right, toward New Mexico, then a mile later a left, straight south, toward old Mexico. Her dress was creased across the middle, like maybe she was wearing it a second day. Her perfume was subtle, mixed into the freezing air from the dashboard vents.
'So is Pecan worth seeing?' Reacher asked, in the silence.
'Pecos,' she said.
'Right, Pecos.'
She shrugged. 'I like it,' she said. 'It's mostly Mexican, so I'm comfortable there.'
Her right hand tensed on the wheel. He saw tendons shifting under the skin.
'You like Mexican people?' she asked.
He shrugged back. 'As much as I like any people, I guess.'
'You don't like people?'
'It varies.'
'You like cantaloupe?'
'As much as I like any fruit.'
'Pecos grows the sweetest cantaloupe in the whole of Texas,' she said. 'And therefore, in their opinion, in the whole of the world. Also there's a rodeo there in July, but you've missed it for this year. And just north of Pecos is Loving County. You ever heard of Loving County?'
He shook his head. 'Never been here before.'
'It's the least-populated county in the whole of the United States,' she said. 'Well, if you leave out some of the places in Alaska, I guess. But also the richest, per capita. Population is a hundred and ten souls, but there are four hundred and twenty oil leases active.'
He nodded. 'So let me out in Pecos. It sounds like a fun place.'
'It was the real Wild West,' she said. 'A long time ago, of course. The Texas and Pacific Railroad put a stop there. So there were saloons and all. Used to be a bad place. It was a word, too, as well as a town. A verb, and also a place. To pecos somebody meant to shoot them and throw them in the Pecos River.'
'They still do that?'
She smiled again. A different smile. This smile traded some elegance for some mischief. It eased her tension. It made her appealing.
'No, they don't do that so much, now,' she said.
'Your family from Pecos?'
'No, California,' she said. 'I came to Texas when I got married.'
_Keep talking_ , he thought. _She saved your ass_.
'Been married long?' he asked.
'Just under seven years.'
'Your family been in California long?'
She paused and smiled again. 'Longer than any Californian, that's for sure,' she said.
They were in flat empty country and she eased the silent car faster down a dead-straight road. The hot sky was tinted bottle-green by the windshield. The instrumentation on her dashboard showed it was a hundred and ten degrees outside and sixty inside.
'You a lawyer?' he asked.
She was puzzled for a moment, and then she made the connection and craned to glance at her briefcase in the mirror.
'No,' she said. 'I'm a lawyer's client.'
The conversation went dead again. She seemed nervous, and he felt awkward about it.
'And what else are you?' he asked.
She paused a beat. 'Somebody's wife and mother,' she said. 'And somebody's daughter and sister, I guess. And I keep a few horses. That's all. What are you?'
'Nothing in particular,' Reacher said.
'You have to be something,' she said.
'Well, I used to be things,' he said. 'I was somebody's son, and somebody's brother, and somebody's boyfriend.'
'Was?'
'My parents died, my brother died, my girlfriend left me.'
_Not a great line_ , he thought. She said nothing back.
'And I don't have any horses,' he added.
'I'm very sorry,' she said.
'That I don't have horses?'
'No, that you're all alone in the world.'
'Water under the bridge,' he said. 'It's not as bad as it sounds.'
'You're not lonely?'
He shrugged. 'I like being alone.'
She paused. 'Why did your girlfriend leave you?'
'She went to work in Europe.'
'And you couldn't go with her?'
'She didn't really want me to go with her.'
'I see,' she said. 'Did _you_ want to go with her?'
He was quiet for a beat. 'Not really, I guess,' he said. 'Too much like settling down.'
'And you don't want to settle down?'
He shook his head. 'Two nights in the same motel gives me the creeps.'
'Hence one day in Lubbock,' she said.
'And the next day in Pecos,' he said.
'And after that?'
He smiled. 'After that, I have no idea,' he said. 'And that's the way I like it.'
She drove on, silent as the car.
'So you _are_ running away from something,' she said. 'Maybe you had a very settled life before and you want to escape from that particular feeling.'
He shook his head again. 'No, the exact opposite, really. I was in the Army all my life, which is very _un_ settled, and I grew to like the feeling.'
'I see,' she said. 'You became habituated to chaos, maybe.'
'I guess so.'
She paused. 'How is a person in the Army all his life?'
'My father was in, too. So I grew up on military bases all over the world, and then I stayed in afterwards.'
'But now you're out.'
He nodded. 'All trained up and nowhere to go.'
He saw her thinking about his answer. He saw her tension come back. She started stepping harder on the gas, maybe without realizing it, maybe like an involuntary reflex. He had the feeling her interest in him was quickening, like the car.
Ford builds Crown Victorias at its plant up in St Thomas, Canada, tens of thousands a year, and almost all of them without exception are sold to police departments, taxicab companies, or rental fleets. Almost none of them are sold to private citizens. Full-size turnpike cruisers no longer earn much of a market share, and for those die-hards who still want one from the Ford Motor Company, the Mercury Grand Marquis is the same car in fancier clothes for about the same money, so it mops up the private sales. Which makes private Crown Vics rarer than red Rolls-Royces, so the subliminal response when you see one that isn't taxicab-yellow or black and white with _Police_ all over the doors is to think it's an unmarked detective's car. Or government issue of some other kind, maybe US Marshals, or FBI, or Secret Service, or a courtesy vehicle given to a medical examiner or a big-city fire chief.
That's the subliminal impression, and there are ways to enhance it a little.
In the empty country halfway to Abilene, the tall fair man pulled off the highway and headed through vast fields and past dense woodlands until he found a dusty turn-out probably ten miles from the nearest human being. He stopped there and turned off the motor and popped the trunk. The small dark man heaved the heavy valise out and laid it on the ground. The woman zipped it open and handed a pair of Virginia plates to the tall fair man. He took a screwdriver from the valise and removed the Texas plates, front and rear. Bolted the Virginia issue in their place. The small dark man pulled the plastic covers off all four wheels, leaving the cheap black steel rims showing. He stacked the wheel covers like plates and pitched them into the trunk. The woman took radio antennas from the valise, four of them, CB whips and cellular telephone items bought cheap at a Radio Shack in LA. The cellular antennas stuck to the rear window with self-adhesive pads. She waited until the trunk was closed again and placed the CB antennas on the lid. They had magnetic bases. They weren't wired up to anything. They were just for show.
Then the small dark man took his rightful place behind the wheel and U-turned through the dust and headed back to the highway, cruising easily. A Crown Vic, plain steel wheels, a forest of antennas, Virginia plates. Maybe an FBI pool car, three agents inside, maybe on urgent business.
'What did you do in the Army?' the woman asked, very casually.
'I was a cop,' Reacher said.
'They have cops in the Army?'
'Sure they do,' he said. 'Military police. Like cops, inside the service.'
'I didn't know that,' she said.
She went quiet again. She was thinking hard. She seemed excited.
'Would you mind if I asked you some questions?' she said.
He shrugged. 'You're giving me a ride.'
She nodded. 'I wouldn't want to offend you.'
'That would be hard to do, in the circumstances. Hundred and ten degrees out there, sixty in here.'
'There'll be a storm soon. There has to be, with a temperature like this.'
He glanced ahead at the sky. It was tinted bottle-green by the windshield glass, and it was blindingly clear.
'I don't see any sign of it,' he said.
She smiled again, briefly. 'May I ask where you live?'
'I don't live anywhere,' he said. 'I move around.'
'You don't have a home somewhere?'
He shook his head. 'What you see is what I've got.'
'You travel light,' she said.
'Light as I can.'
She paused for a fast mile.
'Are you out of work?' she asked.
He nodded. 'Usually.'
'Were you a good cop? In the Army?'
'Good enough, I guess. They made me a major, gave me some medals.'
She paused. 'So why did you leave?'
It felt like an interview. For a loan, or for a job.
'They downsized me out of there,' he said. 'End of the Cold War, they wanted a smaller Army, not so many people in it, so they didn't need so many cops to look after them.'
She nodded. 'Like a town. If the population gets smaller, the police department gets smaller, too. Something to do with appropriations. Taxes, or something.'
He said nothing.
'I live in a very small town,' she said. 'Echo, south of Pecos, like I told you. It's a lonely place. That's why they named it Echo. Not because it's echoey, like an empty room. It's from ancient Greek mythology. Echo was a young girl in love with Narcissus. But he loved himself, not her, so she pined away until just her voice was left. So that's why it's called Echo. Not many inhabitants. But it's a county, too. A county and a township. Not as empty as Loving County, but there's no police department at all. Just the county sheriff, on his own.'
Something in her voice.
'Is that a problem?' he asked.
'It's a very _white_ county,' she said. 'Not like Pecos at all.'
'So?'
'So one feels there _might_ be a problem, if push came to shove.'
'And has push come to shove?'
She smiled, awkwardly. 'I can tell you were a cop,' she said. 'You ask so many questions. And it's me who wanted to ask all the questions.'
She fell silent for a spell and just drove, slim dark hands light on the wheel, going fast but not hurrying. He used the cushion-shaped buttons again and laid his seat back another fraction. Watched her in the corner of his eye. She was pretty, but she was troubled. Ten years from now, she was going to have some excellent frown lines.
'What was life like in the Army?' she asked.
'Different,' he said. 'Different from life outside the Army.'
'Different how?'
'Different rules, different situations. It was a world of its own. It was very regulated, but it was kind of lawless. Kind of rough and uncivilized.'
'Like the Wild West,' she said.
'I guess,' he said back. 'A million people trained first and foremost to do what needed doing. The rules came afterwards.'
'Like the Wild West,' she said again. 'I think you liked it.'
He nodded. 'Some of it.'
She paused. 'May I ask you a personal question?'
'Go ahead,' he said.
'What's your name?'
'Reacher,' he said.
'Is that your first name? Or your last?'
'People just call me Reacher,' he said.
She paused again. 'May I ask you another personal question?'
He nodded.
'Have you killed people, Reacher? In the Army?'
He nodded again. 'Some.'
'That's what the Army is all about, fundamentally, isn't it?' she said.
'I guess so,' he said. 'Fundamentally.'
She went quiet again. Like she was struggling with a decision.
'There's a museum in Pecos,' she said. 'A real Wild West museum. It's partly in an old saloon, and partly in the old hotel next door. Out back is the site of Clay Allison's grave. You ever heard of Clay Allison?'
Reacher shook his head.
'They called him the Gentleman Gunfighter,' she said. 'He retired, actually, but then he fell under the wheels of a grain cart and he died from his injuries. They buried him there. There's a nice headstone, with _Robert Clay Allison 1840–1887_ on it. I've seen it. And an inscription. The inscription says _he never killed a man that did not need killing_. What do you think of that?'
'I think it's a fine inscription,' Reacher said.
'There's an old newspaper, too,' she said. 'In a glass case. From Kansas City, I think, with his obituary in it. It says _certain it is that many of his stern deeds were for the right as he understood that right to be_.'
The Cadillac sped on south.
'A fine obituary,' Reacher said.
'You think so?'
He nodded. 'As good as you can get, probably.'
'Would you like an obituary like that?'
'Well, not just yet,' Reacher said.
She smiled again, apologetically. 'No,' she said. 'I guess not. But do you think you would like to _qualify_ for an obituary like that? I mean, eventually?'
'I can think of worse things,' he said.
She said nothing.
'You want to tell me where this is heading?' he asked.
'This road?' she said, nervously.
'No, this conversation.'
She drove on for a spell, and then she lifted off the gas pedal and coasted. The car slowed and she pulled off onto the dusty shoulder. The shoulder fell away into a dry irrigation ditch and it put the car at a crazy angle, tilted way down on his side. She put the transmission in park with a small delicate motion of her wrist, and she left the engine idling and the air roaring.
'My name is Carmen Greer,' she said. 'And I need your help.'
TWO
'It wasn't an accident I picked you up, you know,' Carmen Greer said.
Reacher's back was pressed against his door. The Cadillac was listing like a sinking ship, canted hard over on the shoulder. The slippery leather seat gave him no leverage to struggle upright. The woman had one hand on the wheel and the other on his seat back, propping herself above him. Her face was a foot away. It was unreadable. She was looking past him, out at the dust of the ditch.
'You going to be able to drive off this slope?' he asked.
She glanced back and up at the blacktop. Its rough surface was shimmering with heat, about level with the base of her window.
'I think so,' she said. 'I hope so.'
'I hope so, too,' he said.
She just stared at him.
'So why did you pick me up?' he asked.
'Why do you think?'
'I don't know,' he said. 'I thought I just got lucky. I guess I thought you were a kind person doing a stranger a favour.'
She shook her head. 'No, I was looking for a guy like you,' she said.
'Why?'
'I must have picked up a dozen guys,' she said. 'And I've seen hundreds. That's about all I've been doing, all month long. Cruising around West Texas, looking at who needs a ride.'
'Why?'
She shrugged the question away. A dismissive little gesture.
'The miles I've put on this car,' she said. 'It's unbelievable. And the money I've spent on gas.'
'Why?' he asked again.
She went quiet. Wouldn't answer. Just went into a long silence. The armrest on the door was digging into his kidney. He arched his back and pressed with his shoulders and adjusted his position. Found himself wishing somebody else had picked him up. Somebody content just to motor from A to B. He looked up at her.
'Can I call you Carmen?' he asked.
She nodded. 'Sure. Please.'
'OK, Carmen,' he said. 'Tell me what's going on here, will you?'
Her mouth opened, and then it closed again. Opened, and closed.
'I don't know how to start,' she said. 'Now that it's come to it.'
'Come to what?'
She wouldn't answer.
'You better tell me exactly what you want,' he said. 'Or I'm getting out of the car right here, right now.'
'It's a hundred and ten degrees out there.'
'I know it is.'
'A person could die in this heat.'
'I'll take my chances.'
'You can't get your door open,' she said. 'The car is tilted too much.'
'Then I'll punch out the windshield.'
She paused a beat. 'I need your help,' she said again.
'You never saw me before.'
'Not personally,' she said. 'But you fit the bill.'
'What bill?'
She went quiet again. Came up with a brief, ironic smile. 'It's so difficult,' she said. 'I've rehearsed this speech a million times, but now I don't know if it's going to come out right.'
Reacher said nothing. Just waited.
'You ever had anything to do with lawyers?' she asked. 'They don't do anything for you. They just want a lot of money and a lot of time, and then they tell you there's nothing much to be done.'
'So get a new lawyer,' he said.
'I've had four,' she said. 'Four, in a month. They're all the same. And they're all too expensive. I don't have enough money.'
'You're driving a Cadillac.'
'It's my mother-in-law's. I'm only borrowing it.'
'You're wearing a big diamond ring.'
She went quiet again. Her eyes clouded. 'My husband gave it to me,' she said.
He looked at her. 'So can't he help you?'
'No, he can't help me,' she said. 'Have you ever gone looking for a private detective?'
'Never needed one. I _was_ a detective.'
'They don't really exist,' she said. 'Not like you see in the movies. They just want to sit in their offices and work with the phone. Or on their computers, with their databases. They won't come out and actually _do_ anything for you. I went all the way to Austin. A guy there said he could help, but he wanted to use six men and charge me nearly ten thousand dollars a week.'
'For what?'
'So I got desperate. I was really panicking. Then I got this idea. I figured if I looked at people hitching rides, I might find somebody. One of them might turn out to be the right type of person, and willing to help me. I tried to choose pretty carefully. I only stopped for rough-looking men.'
'Thanks, Carmen,' Reacher said.
'I don't mean it badly,' she said. 'It's not uncomplimentary.'
'But it could have been dangerous.'
She nodded. 'It nearly was, a couple of times. But I had to take the risk. I had to find _somebody_. I figured I might get rodeo guys, or men from the oil fields. You know, tough guys, roughnecks, maybe out of work, with a little time on their hands. Maybe a little anxious to earn some money, but I can't pay much. Is that going to be a problem?'
'So far, Carmen, everything is going to be a problem.'
She went quiet again. 'I talked to them all,' she said. 'You know, chatted with them a little, discussed things, like we did. I was trying to make some kind of judgement about what they were like, inside, in terms of their characters. I was trying to assess their qualities. Maybe twelve of them. And none of them were really any good. But I think you are.'
'You think I'm what?'
'I think you're my best chance so far,' she said. 'Really, I do. A former cop, been in the Army, no ties anywhere, you couldn't be better.'
'I'm not looking for a job, Carmen.'
She nodded happily. 'I know. I figured that out already. But that's better still, I think. It keeps it pure, don't you see that? Help for help's sake. No mercenary aspect to it. And your background is perfect. It obligates you.'
He stared at her. 'No, it doesn't.'
'You were a soldier,' she said. 'And a _policeman_. It's perfect. You're _supposed_ to help people. That's what cops _do_.'
'We spent most of our time busting heads. Not a whole lot of helping went on.'
'But it must have. That's what cops are _for_. It's like their fundamental duty. And an Army cop is even better. You said it yourself, you do what's necessary.'
'If you need a cop, go to the county sheriff. Pecos, or wherever it is.'
'Echo,' she said. 'I live in Echo. South of Pecos.'
'Wherever,' he said. 'Go to the sheriff.'
She was shaking her head. 'No, I can't do that.'
Reacher said nothing more. Just lay half on his back, pressed up against the door by the car's steep angle. The engine was idling patiently, and the air was still roaring. The woman was still braced above him. She had gone silent. She was staring out past him and blinking, like she was about to cry. Like she was ready for a big flood of tears. Like she was tragically disappointed, maybe with him, maybe with herself.
'You must think I'm crazy,' she said.
He turned his head and looked hard at her, top to toe. Strong slim legs, strong slim arms, the expensive dress. It was riding up on her thighs, and he could see her bra strap at her shoulder. It was snow-white against the colour of her skin. She had clean combed hair and trimmed painted nails. An elegant, intelligent face, tired eyes.
'I'm not crazy,' she said.
Then she looked straight at him. Something in her face. Maybe an appeal. Or maybe hopelessness, or desperation.
'It's just that I've dreamed about this for a month,' she said. 'My last hope. It was a ridiculous plan, I guess, but it's all I had. And there was always the chance it would work, and with you I think maybe it could, and now I'm screwing it up by coming across like a crazy woman.'
He paused a long time. Minutes. He thought back to a pancake house he'd seen in Lubbock, right across the strip from his motel. It had looked pretty good. He could have crossed the street, gone in there, had a big stack with bacon on the side. Lots of syrup. Maybe an egg. He would have come out a half-hour after she blew town. He could be sitting next to some cheerful trucker now, listening to rock and roll on the radio. On the other hand, he could be bruised and bleeding in a police cell, with an arraignment date coming up.
'So start over,' he said. 'Just say what you've got to say. But first, drive us out of this damn ditch. I'm very uncomfortable. And I could use a cup of coffee. Is there anyplace up ahead where we could get coffee?'
'I think so,' she said. 'Yes, there is. About an hour, I think.'
'So let's go there. Let's get a cup of coffee.'
'You're going to dump me and run,' she said.
It was an attractive possibility. She stared at him, maybe five long seconds, and then she nodded, like a decision was made. She put the transmission in D and hit the gas. The car had front-wheel drive, and all the weight was on the back, so the tyres just clawed at nothing and spun. Gravel rattled against the underbody and a cloud of hot khaki dust rose up all around them. Then the tyres caught and the car heaved itself out of the ditch and bounced up over the edge of the blacktop. She got it straight in the lane, and then she floored it and took off south.
'I don't know where to begin,' she said.
'At the beginning,' he said. 'Always works best that way. Think about it, tell me over coffee. We've got the time.'
She shook her head. Stared forward through the windshield, eyes locked on the empty shimmering road ahead. She was quiet for a mile, already doing seventy.
'No, we don't,' she said. 'It's real urgent.'
Fifty miles southwest of Abilene, on a silent county road ten miles north of the main east–west highway, the Crown Victoria waited quietly on the shoulder, its engine idling, its hood unlatched and standing an inch open for better cooling. All around it was flatness so extreme the curvature of the earth was revealed, the dusty parched brush falling slowly away to the horizon in every direction. There was no traffic, and therefore no noise beyond the tick and whisper of the idling engine and the heavy buzz of the earth baking and cracking under the unbearable heat of the sun.
The driver had the electric door mirror racked all the way outward so he could see the whole of the road behind him. The Crown Vic's own dust had settled and the view was clear for about a mile, right back to the point where the blacktop and the sky mixed together and broke and boiled into a silvery shimmering mirage. The driver had his eyes focused on that distant glare, waiting for it to be pierced by the indistinct shape of a car.
He knew what car it would be. The team was well briefed. It would be a white Mercedes Benz, driven by a man on his own toward an appointment he couldn't miss. The man would be driving fast, because he would be running late, because he was habitually late for everything. They knew the time of his appointment, and they knew his destination was thirty miles farther on up the road, so simple arithmetic gave them a target time they could set their watches by. A target time that was fast approaching.
'So let's do it,' the driver said.
He stepped out of the car into the heat and clicked the hood down into place. Slid back into the seat and took a ball cap from the woman. It was one of three bought from a souvenir vendor on Hollywood Boulevard, thirteen ninety-five each. It was dark blue, with _FBI_ machine-embroidered in white cotton thread across the front. The driver squared it on his head and pulled the peak low over his eyes. Moved the transmission lever into drive and kept his foot hard on the brake. Leaned forward a fraction and kept his eyes on the mirror.
'Right on time,' he said.
The silver mirage was boiling and wobbling and a white shape pulled free of it and speared out toward them like a fish leaping out of water. The shape settled and steadied on the road, moving fast, crouching low. A white Mercedes sedan, wide tyres, dark windows.
The driver eased his foot off the brake and the Crown Vic crawled forward through the dust. He touched the gas when the Mercedes was still a hundred yards behind him. The Mercedes roared past and the Crown Vic pulled out into the hot blast of its slipstream. The driver straightened the wheel and accelerated. Smiled with his lips hard together. The killing crew was going to work again.
The Mercedes driver saw headlights flashing in his mirror and looked again and saw the sedan behind him. Two peaked caps silhouetted in the front seat. He dropped his eyes automatically to his speedo, which was showing more than ninety. Felt the cold _oh-shit_ stab in his chest. Eased off the gas while he calculated how late he was already and how far he still had to go and what his best approach to these guys should be. Humility? Or maybe _I'm-too-important-to-behassled?_ Or what about a sort of _come-on-guys, I'm-working-too_ camaraderie?
The sedan pulled alongside as he slowed and he saw three people, one of them a woman. Radio antennas all over the car. No lights, no siren. Not regular cops. The driver was waving him to the shoulder. The woman was pressing an ID wallet against her window. It had _FBI_ in two-inch-high letters. Their caps said _FBI_. Serious-looking people, in some kind of duty fatigues. Serious-looking squad car. He relaxed a little. The FBI didn't stop you for speeding. Must be something else. Maybe some kind of security check, which made sense considering what lay thirty miles up the road. He nodded to the woman and braked and eased right, onto the shoulder. He feathered the pedal and coasted to a stop in a big cloud of dust. The Bureau car eased up and stopped behind him, the brightness of its headlight beams dimmed by the cloud.
The way to do it is to keep them quiet and alive as long as possible. Postpone any kind of struggle. Struggling leads to evidence, blood and fibres and body fluids spraying and leaking all over the place. So they all three got out of the car at a medium speed, like they were harassed professionals dealing with something important, but not something right up there at the top of their agenda.
'Mr Eugene?' the woman called. 'Al Eugene, right?'
The Mercedes driver opened his door and slid out of his seat and stood up in the heat and the glare. He was around thirty, not tall, dark and sallow, soft and rounded. He faced the woman, and she saw some kind of innate southern courtesy toward women place him at an immediate disadvantage.
'What can I do for you, ma'am?' he asked.
'Your cellular phone not working, sir?' the woman asked.
Eugene patted at the pocket of his suit coat. 'Should be,' he said.
'May I see it, sir?'
Eugene took it out of his pocket and handed it over. The woman dialled a number and looked surprised.
'Seems OK,' she said. 'Sir, can you spare us five minutes?'
'Maybe,' Eugene said. 'If you tell me what for.'
'We have an FBI assistant director a ways up the road, needs to speak with you. Something urgent, I guess, or we wouldn't be here, and something pretty important, or we'd have been told what it's all about.'
Eugene pulled back his cuff and looked at his watch. 'I have an appointment,' he said.
The woman was nodding. 'We know about that, sir. We took the liberty of calling ahead and rescheduling for you. Five minutes is all we need.'
Eugene shrugged. 'Can I see some ID?' he asked.
The woman handed over her wallet. It was made of worn black leather and had a milky plastic window on the outside. There was an FBI photo-ID behind it, laminated and embossed and printed with the kind of slightly old-fashioned typeface the federal government might use. Like most people in the United States, Eugene had never seen an FBI ID. He assumed he was looking at his first.
'Up the road a piece?' he said. 'OK, I'll follow you, I guess.'
'We'll drive you,' the woman said. 'There's a checkpoint in place, and civilian cars make them real nervous. We'll bring you right back. Five minutes, is all.'
Eugene shrugged again. 'OK,' he said.
They all walked as a group back toward the Crown Vic. The driver held the front passenger door for Eugene.
'You ride up here, sir,' he said. 'They're listing you as a class A individual, and if we put a class A individual in the back seat, then we'll get our asses kicked but good, that's for damn sure.'
They saw Eugene swell up a little from his assigned status. He nodded and ducked down and slid into the front seat. Either he hadn't noticed they still had his phone, or he didn't care. The driver closed the door on him and ducked around the hood to his own. The tall fair man and the woman climbed into the rear. The Crown Vic eased around the parked Benz and pulled left onto the blacktop. Accelerated up to about fifty-five.
'Ahead,' the woman said.
The driver nodded. 'I see it,' he said. 'We'll make it.'
There was a plume of dust on the road, three or four miles into the distance. It was rising up and dragging left in the faint breeze. The driver slowed, hunting the turn he had scouted thirty minutes before. He spotted it and pulled left and crossed the opposite shoulder and bumped down through a depression where the road was built up like a causeway. Then he slewed to the right, tight in behind a stand of brush tall enough to hide the car. The man and the woman in the rear seat came out with handguns and leaned forward and jammed them into Eugene's neck, right behind the ears where the structure of the human skull provides two nice muzzle-shaped sockets.
'Sit real still,' the woman said.
Eugene sat real still. Two minutes later, a big dark vehicle blasted by above them. A truck, or a bus. Dust clouded the sky and the brush rustled in the moving air. The driver got out and approached Eugene's door with a gun in his hand. He opened the door and leaned in and jammed the muzzle into Eugene's throat, where the ends of the collar bones make another convenient socket.
'Get out,' he said. 'Real careful.'
'What?' was all Eugene could say.
'We'll tell you what,' the woman said. 'Now get out.'
Eugene got out, with three guns at his head.
'Step away from the car,' the woman said. 'Walk away from the road.'
This was the tricky time. Eugene was glancing around as far and as fast as he dared move his head. His eyes were jumping. His body was twitching. He stepped away from the car. One pace, two, three. Eyes everywhere. The woman nodded.
'Al,' she called loudly.
Her two partners jumped away, long sideways strides. Eugene's head snapped round to face the woman who had called his name. She shot him through the right eye. The sound of the gun clapped and rolled across the hot landscape like thunder. The back of Eugene's head came off in a messy cloud and he went straight down and sprawled in a loose tangle of arms and legs. The woman stepped around him and crouched down and took a closer look. Then she stepped away and stood up straight with her legs and arms spread, like she was ready to be searched at the airport.
'Check,' she said.
The two men stepped close and examined every inch of her skin and clothing. They checked her hair and her hands.
'Clear,' the small dark man said.
'Clear,' the tall fair man said.
She nodded. A faint smile. No residue. No evidence. No blood or bone or brains anywhere on her person.
'OK,' she said.
The two men stepped back to Eugene and took an arm and a leg each and dragged his body ten feet into the brush. They had found a narrow limestone cleft there, a crack in the rock maybe eight feet deep and a foot and a half across, wide enough to take a man's corpse sideways, too narrow to admit the six-foot wingspan of a vulture or a buzzard. They manoeuvred the body until the trailing hand and the trailing foot fell into the hole. Then they lowered away carefully until they were sure the torso would fit. This guy was fatter than some. But he slid in without snagging on the rock. As soon as they were sure, they dropped him the rest of the way. He wedged tight, about seven feet down.
The bloodstains were already drying and blackening. They kicked desert dust over them and swept the area with a mesquite branch to confuse the mass of footprints. Then they walked over and climbed into the Crown Vic and the driver backed up and swung through the brush. Bounced through the dip and up the slope to the roadway. The big car nosed back the way it had come and accelerated gently to fifty-five miles an hour. Moments later it passed by Eugene's white Mercedes, parked right where he'd left it, on the other side of the road. It already looked abandoned and filmed with dust.
'I have a daughter,' Carmen Greer said. 'I told you that, right?'
'You told me you were a mother,' Reacher said.
She nodded at the wheel. 'Of a daughter. She's six and a half years old.'
Then she went quiet for a minute.
'They called her Mary Ellen,' she said.
'They?'
'My husband's family.'
'They named your kid?'
'It just happened, I guess. I wasn't in a good position to stop it.'
Reacher was quiet for a beat. 'What would you have called her?' he asked.
She shrugged. 'Gloria, maybe. I thought she was glorious.'
She went quiet again.
'But she's Mary Ellen,' he said.
She nodded. 'They call her Ellie, for short. Miss Ellie, sometimes.'
'And she's six and a half?'
'But we've been married less than seven years. I told you that, too, right? So you can do the math. Is that a problem?'
'Doing the math?'
'Thinking about the implication.'
He shook his head at the windshield. 'Not a problem to me. Why would it be?'
'Not a problem to me, either,' she said. 'But it explains why I wasn't in a good position.'
He made no reply.
'We got off to all kinds of a bad start,' she said. 'Me and his family.'
She said it with a dying fall in her voice, the way a person might refer back to a tragedy in the past, a car wreck, a plane crash, a fatal diagnosis. The way a person might refer back to the day her life changed for ever. She gripped the wheel and the car drove itself on, a cocoon of cold and quiet in the blazing landscape.
'Who are they?' he asked.
'The Greers,' she said. 'An old Echo County family. Been there since Texas was first stolen. Maybe they were there to steal some of it themselves.'
'What are they like?'
'They're what you might expect,' she said. 'Old white Texans, big money from way back, a lot of it gone now but a lot of it still left, some history with oil and cattle ranching, river-baptized Protestants, not that they ever go to church or think about what the Lord might be saying to them. They hunt animals for pleasure. The father died some time ago, the mother is still alive, there are two sons, and there are cousins all over the county. My husband is the elder boy, Sloop Greer.'
'Sloop?' Reacher said.
She smiled for the first time since driving out of the ditch. 'Sloop,' she said again.
'What kind of a name is that?'
'An old family name,' she said. 'Some ancestor, I guess. Probably he was at the Alamo, fighting against mine.'
'Sounds like a boat. What's the other boy called? Yacht? Tug? Ocean liner? Oil tanker?'
'Robert,' she said. 'People call him Bobby.'
'Sloop,' Reacher said again. 'That's a new one to me.'
'New to me, too,' she said. 'The whole thing was new to me. But I used to like his name. It marked him out, somehow.'
'I guess it would.'
'I met him in California,' Carmen said. 'We were in school together, UCLA.'
'Off of his home turf,' Reacher said.
She stopped smiling. 'Correct. Only way it could have happened, looking back. If I'd have met him out here, you know, with the whole package out in plain view, it would never have happened. No way. I can promise you that. Always assuming I'd even _come_ out here, in the first place, which I hope I wouldn't have.'
She stopped talking and squinted ahead into the glare of the sun. There was a ribbon of black road and a bright shape up ahead on the left, shiny aluminium broken into moving fragments by the haze boiling up off the blacktop.
'There's the diner,' she said. 'They'll have coffee, I'm sure.'
'Strange kind of a diner if it didn't,' he said.
'There are lots of strange things here,' she said.
The diner sat alone on the side of the road, set on a slight rise in the centre of an acre of beaten dirt serving as its parking lot. There was a sign on a tall pole and no shade anywhere. There were two pick-up trucks, carelessly parked, far from each other.
'OK,' she said, hesitant, starting to slow the car. 'Now you're going to run. You figure one of those guys with the pick-ups will give you a ride.'
He said nothing.
'If you are, do it later, OK?' she said. 'Please? I don't want to be left alone in a place like this.'
She slowed some more and bounced off the road onto the dirt. Parked right next to the sign pole, as if it was a shade tree offering protection from the sun. Its slender shadow fell across the hood like a bar. She pushed the lever into park and switched off the engine. The air conditioner's compressor hissed and gurgled in the sudden silence. Reacher opened his door. The heat hit him like a steelyard furnace. It was so intense he could hardly catch his breath. He stood dumb for a second and waited for her and then they walked together across the hot dirt. It was baked dry and hard, like concrete. Beyond it was a tangle of mesquite brush and a blinding white-hot sky as far as the eye could see. He let her walk half a pace ahead of him, so he could watch her. She had her eyes half closed and her head bowed down to the ground, like she didn't want to see or be seen. The hem on her dress had fallen to a decorous knee-length. She moved very gracefully, like a dancer, her upper body erect and perfectly still and her bare legs scissoring elegantly below it.
The diner had a tiny foyer with a cigarette machine and a rack full of flyers about real estate and oil changes and small-town rodeos and gun shows. Inside the second door it was cold again. They stood together in the delicious chill for a moment. There was a register next to the door and a tired waitress sitting sideways on a counter stool. A cook visible in the kitchen. Two men in separate booths, eating. All four people looked up and paused, like there were things they could say but wouldn't.
Reacher looked at each of them for a second and then turned away and led Carmen to a booth at the far end of the room. He slid across sticky vinyl and tilted his head back into a jet of cold air coming down from a vent in the ceiling. Carmen sat opposite and raised her head and he looked at her face-on for the first time.
'My daughter looks nothing at all like me,' she said. 'Sometimes I think that's the cruellest irony in this whole situation. Those big old Greer genes just about steamrollered mine, that's for sure.'
She had spectacular dark eyes with long lashes and a slight tilt to them, and a straight nose that made an open Y shape against her brows. High cheekbones framed by thick black hair that shone navy in the light. A rosebud of a mouth with a subtle trace of red lipstick. Her skin was smooth and clear, the colour of weak tea or dark honey, and it had a translucent glow behind it. It was actually a whole lot lighter in colour than Reacher's own sunburned forearms, and he was white and she wasn't.
'So who does Ellie look like?' he asked.
'Them,' she said.
The waitress brought ice water and a pad and a pencil and an upturned chin and no conversation. Carmen ordered iced coffee and Reacher ordered his hot and black.
'She doesn't look like she's mine at all,' Carmen said. 'Pink skin, yellow hair, a little chubby. But she's got my eyes.'
'Lucky Ellie,' Reacher said.
She smiled briefly. 'Thank you. Plan is she should stay lucky.'
She held the water glass flat against her face. Then she used a napkin to wipe the dew away. The waitress brought their drinks. The iced coffee was in a tall glass, and she spilled some of it as she put it down. Reacher's was in an insulated plastic flask and she shoved an empty china mug across the table next to it. She left the check face down halfway between the two drinks, and walked away without saying anything at all.
'You need to understand I loved Sloop once,' Carmen said.
Reacher made no reply, and she looked straight at him.
'Does it bother you to hear this kind of stuff?' she asked.
He shook his head, although the truth was it did bother him, a little. Loners aren't necessarily too comfortable with a stranger's intimacies.
'You told me to start at the beginning,' she said.
'Yes,' he said. 'I did.'
'So I will,' she said. 'I loved him once. You need to understand that. And you need to understand that wasn't hard to do. He was big, and he was handsome, and he smiled a lot, and he was casual, and he was relaxed. And we were in school and we were young, and LA is a very special place, where anything seems possible and nothing seems to matter very much.'
She took a drinking straw from the canister on the table and unwrapped it.
'And you need to know where I was coming from,' she said. 'Truth is, I had it all completely backward. I wasn't some Mexican worrying about whether the white family would accept me. I was worrying about _my_ family accepting this gringo boy. That's how it seemed to me. I come from a thousand acres in Napa, we've been there for ever, we were always the richest people I knew. And the most cultured. We had the art, and the history, and the music. We gave to museums. We employed white people. So I spent my time worrying about what my folks would say about me marrying out.'
He sipped his coffee. It was stewed and old, but it would do.
'And what did they say?' he asked.
'They went insane. I thought they were being foolish. Now I understand they weren't.'
'So what happened?'
She sipped her drink through the straw. Took a napkin from a canister and dabbed her lips. It came away marked with her lipstick.
'Well, I was pregnant,' she said. 'And that made everything a million times worse, of course. My parents are very devout, and they're very traditional, and basically they cut me off, I guess. They disowned me. It was like the whole Victorian thing, expelled from the snowy doorstep with a bundle of rags, except it wasn't snowing, of course, and the bundle of rags was really a Louis Vuitton valise.'
'So what did you do?'
'We got married. Nobody came, just a few friends from school. We lived a few months in LA, we graduated, we stayed there until the baby was a month away. It was fun, actually. We were young and in love.'
He poured himself a second cup of coffee.
'But?' he asked.
'But Sloop couldn't find a job. I began to realize he wasn't trying very hard. Getting a job wasn't in his plan. College was four years of fun for him, then it was back to the fold, go take over Daddy's business. His father was ready to retire by then. I didn't like that idea. I thought we were starting up fresh, on our own, you know, a new generation on both sides. I felt I'd given stuff up, and I thought he should, too. So we argued a lot. I couldn't work, because of being so pregnant, and I had no money of my own. So in the end we couldn't make the rent, so in the end he won the argument, and we trailed back here to Texas, and we moved into the big old house with his folks and his brother and his cousins all around, and I'm still there.'
The dying fall was back in her voice. The day her life changed for ever.
'And?' he asked.
She looked straight at him. 'And it was like the ground opens up and you fall straight through to hell. It was such a shock, I couldn't even react at all. They treated me strange, and the second day I suddenly realized what was going on. All my life I'd been like a princess, you know, and then I was just a hip kid among ten thousand others in LA, but now I was suddenly just a piece of beaner trash. They never said it straight out, but it was _so_ clear. They hated me, because I was the greaseball whore who'd hooked their darling boy. They were painfully polite, because I guess their strategy was to wait for Sloop to come to his senses and dump me. It happens, you know, in Texas. The good old boys, when they're young and foolish, they like a little dark meat. Sometimes it's like a rite of passage. Then they wise up and straighten out. I knew that's what they were thinking. And hoping. And it was a shock, believe me. I had never thought of myself like that. Never. I'd never had to. Never had to confront it. The whole world was turned upside down, in an instant. Like falling in freezing water. Couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't even move.'
'But he didn't dump you, evidently.'
She looked down at the table.
'No,' she said. 'He didn't dump me. He started hitting me instead. First time, he punched me in the face. Then Ellie was born the next day.'
The Crown Victoria turned back into a normal Hertz rental behind a stand of trees eight miles off the highway, halfway between Abilene and Big Spring. The Virginia plates came off, and the Texas plates went back on. The plastic wheel covers were kicked back into place. The cellular antennas were peeled off the rear glass and laid back in the valise. The CB whips pulled clear of the sheet metal and joined them. The souvenir ball caps were nested together and packed away with the handguns. Eugene's mobile phone was smashed against a rock and the pieces hurled deep into the copse. A little grit from the shoulder of the road was sprinkled onto the front passenger seat, so that the rental people would have to vacuum up any of Eugene's stray hairs and fibres along with it.
Then the big sedan pulled back onto the blacktop and wound its way back to the highway. It cruised comfortably, heading west, a forgettable vehicle filled with three forgettable people. It made one more stop, at a comfort area named for the Colorado River, where sodas were consumed and a call was made from an untraceable payphone. The call was to Las Vegas, from where it was re-routed to Dallas, from where it was re-routed to an office in a small town in the west of Texas. The call reported complete success so far, and it was gratefully received.
'He split my lip and loosened my teeth,' Carmen Greer said.
Reacher watched her face.
'That was the first time,' she said. 'He just lost it. But straight away he was full of remorse. He drove me to the emergency room himself. It's a long, long drive from the house, hours and hours, and the whole way he was begging me to forgive him. Then he was begging me not to tell the truth about what had happened. He seemed really ashamed, so I agreed. But I never had to say anything anyway, because as soon as we arrived I started into labour and they took me straight upstairs to the delivery unit. Ellie was born the next day.'
'And then what?'
'And then it was OK,' she said. 'For a week, at least. Then he started hitting me again. I was doing everything wrong. I was paying too much attention to the baby, I didn't want sex because I was hurting from the stitches. He said I had gotten fat and ugly from the pregnancy.'
Reacher said nothing.
'He got me believing it,' she said. 'For a long, long time. That happens, you know. You've got to be very self-confident to resist it. And I wasn't, in that situation. He took away all my self-esteem. Two or three years, I thought it _was_ my fault, and I tried to do better.'
'What did the family do?'
She pushed her glass away. Left the iced coffee half finished.
'They didn't know about it,' she said. 'And then his father died, which made it worse. He was the only reasonable one. He was OK. But now it's just his mother and his brother. He's awful, and she's a witch. And they still don't know. It happens in secret. It's a big house. It's like a compound, really. We're not all on top of each other. And it's all very complicated. He's way too stubborn and proud to ever agree with them he's made a mistake. So the more they're down on me, the more he pretends he loves me. He misleads them. He buys me things. He bought me this ring.'
She held up her right hand, bent delicately at the wrist, showing off the platinum band with the big diamond. It looked like a hell of a thing. Reacher had never bought a diamond ring. He had no idea what they cost. A lot, he guessed.
'He bought me horses,' she said. 'They knew I wanted horses, and he bought them for me, so he could look good in front of them. But really to explain away the bruises. It was his stroke of genius. A permanent excuse. He makes me say I've fallen off. They know I'm still just learning to ride. And that explains a lot in rodeo country, bruises and broken bones. They take it for granted.'
'He's broken your bones?'
She nodded, and started touching parts of her body, twisting and turning in the confines of the tight booth, silently recounting her injuries, hesitating slightly now and then like she couldn't recall them all.
'My ribs, first of all, I guess,' she said. 'He kicks me when I'm on the floor. He does that a lot, when he's mad. My left arm, by twisting it. My collar bone. My jaw. I've had three teeth reimplanted.'
He stared at her.
She shrugged. 'The emergency room people think I'm the worst rider in the history of the West.'
'They believe it?'
'Maybe they just choose to.'
'And his mother and brother?'
'Likewise,' she said. 'Obviously I'm not going to get the benefit of the doubt.'
'Why the hell did you stick around? Why didn't you just get out, the very first time?'
She sighed, and she closed her eyes, and she turned her head away. Spread her hands on the table, palms down, and then turned them over, palms up.
'I can't explain it,' she whispered. 'Nobody can ever explain it. You have to know what it's like. I had no confidence in myself. I had a newborn baby and no money. Not a dime. I had no friends. I was watched all the time. I couldn't even make a call in private.'
He said nothing. She opened her eyes and looked straight at him.
'And worst of all, I had nowhere to go,' she said.
'Home?' he asked.
She shook her head. 'I never even thought about it,' she said. 'Taking the beatings was better than trying to crawl back to my family, with a white blonde baby in my arms.'
He said nothing.
'And the first time you pass up the chance, you've had it,' she said. 'That's how it is. It just gets worse. Whenever I thought about it, I still had no money, I still had a baby, then she was a one-year-old, then a two-year-old, then a three-year-old. The time is never right. If you stay that first time, you're trapped for ever. And I stayed that first time. I wish I hadn't, but I did.'
He said nothing. She looked at him, appealing for something.
'You have to take it on faith,' she said. 'You don't know how it is. You're a man, you're big and strong, somebody hits you, you hit them back. You're on your own, you don't like someplace, you move on. It's different for me. Even if you can't understand it, you have to believe it.'
He said nothing.
'I could have gone if I'd left Ellie,' she said. 'Sloop told me if I left the baby with him, he'd pay my fare anyplace I wanted to go. First class. He said he'd call a limo all the way from Dallas, right there and then, to take me straight to the airport.'
He said nothing.
'But I wouldn't do that,' she said quietly. 'I mean, how could I? So Sloop makes out this is my _choice_. Like I'm agreeing to it. Like I _want_ it. So he keeps on hitting me. Punching me, kicking me, slapping me. Humiliating me, sexually. Every day, even if he isn't mad at me. And if he _is_ mad at me, he just goes crazy.'
There was silence. Just the rush of air from the cooling vents in the diner's ceiling. Vague noise from the kitchens. Carmen Greer's low breathing. The clink of fracturing ice in her abandoned glass. He looked across the table at her, tracing his gaze over her hands, her arms, her neck, her face. The neckline of her dress had shifted left, and he could see a thickened knot on her collarbone. A healed break, no doubt about it. But she was sitting absolutely straight, with her head up and her eyes defiant, and her posture was telling him something.
'He hits you _every_ day?' he asked.
She closed her eyes. 'Well, most every day. Not literally, I guess. But three, four times in a week, usually. Sometimes more. It feels like every day.'
He was quiet for a long moment, looking straight at her.
Then he shook his head.
'You're making it up,' he said.
The watchers stayed resolutely on station, even though there was nothing much to watch. The red house baked under the sun and stayed quiet. The maid came out and fetched a car and drove away in a cloud of dust, presumably to the market. There was some horse activity around the barn. A couple of listless ranch hands walked the animals out and around, brushed them down, put them back inside. There was a bunkhouse way back beyond the barn, same architecture, same blood-red siding. It looked mostly empty, because the barn was mostly empty. Maybe five horses in total, one of them the pony for the kid, mostly just resting in their stalls because of the terrible heat.
The maid came back and carried packages into the kitchen. The boy made a note of it in his book. The dust from her wheels floated slowly back to earth and the men with the telescopes watched it, with their tractor caps reversed to keep the sun off their necks.
'You're lying to me,' Reacher said.
Carmen turned away to the window. Red spots the size of quarters crept high into her cheeks. Anger, he thought. Or embarrassment, maybe.
'Why do you say that?' she asked, quietly.
'Physical evidence,' he said. 'You've got no bruising visible anywhere. Your skin is clear. Light make-up, too light to be hiding anything. It's certainly not hiding the fact you're blushing like crazy. You look like you've just stepped out of the beauty parlour. And you're moving easily. You skipped across that parking lot like a ballerina. So you're not hurting anyplace. You're not stiff and sore. If he's hitting you most every day, he must be doing it with a feather.'
She was quiet for a beat. Then she nodded. 'There's more to tell you,' she said.
He looked away.
'The crucial part,' she said. 'The main point.'
'Why should I listen?'
She took another drinking straw and unwrapped it. Flattened the paper tube that had covered it and began rolling it into a tight spiral, between her finger and thumb.
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'But I had to get your attention.'
Reacher turned his head and looked out of the window, too. The sun was moving the bar of shadow across the Cadillac's hood like the finger on a clock. His attention? He recalled opening his motel room door that morning. A brand new day, ready and waiting to be filled with whatever came his way. He recalled the reflection of the cop in the mirror and the sticky whisper of the Cadillac's tyres on the hot pavement as they slowed alongside him.
'OK, you got my attention,' he said, looking out at the car.
'It happened for five whole years,' she said. 'Exactly like I told you, I promise. Most every day. But then it stopped, a year and a half ago. But I had to tell it to you backward, because I needed you to listen to me.'
He said nothing.
'This isn't easy,' she said. 'Telling this stuff to a stranger.'
He turned back to face her. 'It isn't easy listening to it.'
She took a breath. 'You going to run out on me?'
He shrugged. 'I almost did, a minute ago.'
She was quiet again. 'Please don't,' she said. 'At least, not here. Please. Just listen a little more.'
He looked straight at her. 'OK, I'm listening,' he said.
'But will you still help me?'
'With what?'
She said nothing.
'What did it feel like?' he asked. 'Getting hit?'
'Feel like?' she repeated.
'Physically,' he said.
She looked away. Thought about it. 'Depends where,' she said.
He nodded. She knew it felt different in different places.
'The stomach,' he said.
'I threw up a lot,' she said. 'I was worried, because there was blood.'
He nodded again. She knew what it felt like to be hit in the stomach.
'I swear it's true,' she said. 'Five whole years. Why would I make it up?'
'So what happened?' he said. 'Why did he stop?'
She paused, like she was aware people might be looking at her. Reacher glanced up, and saw heads turn away. The cook, the waitress, the two guys at the distant tables. The cook and the waitress were faster about it than the two guys chose to be. There was hostility in their faces.
'Can we go now?' she asked. 'We need to get back. It's a long drive.'
'I'm coming with you?'
'That's the whole point,' she said.
He glanced away again, out of the window.
'Please, Reacher,' she said. 'At least hear the rest of the story, and then decide. I can let you out in Pecos, if you won't come all the way to Echo. You can see the museum. You can see Clay Allison's grave.'
He watched the bar of shadow touch the Cadillac's windshield. The interior would be like a furnace by now.
'You should see it anyway,' she said. 'If you're exploring Texas.'
'OK,' he said.
'Thank you,' she said.
He made no reply.
'Wait for me,' she said. 'I need to go to the bathroom. It's a long drive.'
She slid out of the booth with uninjured grace and walked the length of the room, head down, looking neither left nor right. The two guys at the tables watched her until she was almost past them and then switched their blank gazes straight back to Reacher. He ignored them and turned the check over and dumped small change from his pocket on top of it, exact amount, no tip. He figured a waitress who didn't talk didn't want one. He slid out of the booth and walked to the door. The two guys watched him all the way. He stood in front of the glass and looked out beyond the parking lot. Watched the flat land bake under the sun for a minute or two until he heard her footsteps behind him. Her hair was combed and she had done something with her lipstick.
'I guess I'll use the bathroom too,' he said.
She glanced right, halfway between the two guys.
'Wait until I'm in the car,' she said. 'I don't want to be left alone in here. I shouldn't have come in here in the first place.'
She pushed out through the doors and he watched her to the car. She got in and he saw it shudder as she started the engine to run the air. He turned and walked back to the men's room. It was a fair-sized space, two porcelain urinals and one toilet cubicle. A chipped sink with a cold water faucet. A fat roll of paper towel sitting on top of the machine it should have been installed in. Not the cleanest facility he had ever seen.
He unzipped and used the left-hand urinal. Heard footsteps outside the door and glanced up at the chromium valve which fed the flush pipes. It was dirty, but it was rounded and it reflected what was behind him like a tiny security mirror. He saw the door open and a man step inside. He saw the door close again and the man settle back against it. He was one of the customers. Presumably one of the pick-up drivers. The chromium valve distorted the view, but the guy's head was nearly to the top of the door. Not a small person. And he was fiddling blindly behind his back. Reacher heard the click of the door lock. Then the guy shifted again and hung his hands loose by his sides. He was wearing a black T-shirt. There was writing on it, but Reacher couldn't read it backward. Some kind of an insignia. Maybe an oil company.
'You new around here?' the guy asked.
Reacher made no reply. Just watched the reflection.
'I asked you a question,' the guy said.
Reacher ignored him.
'I'm talking to you,' the guy said.
'Well, that's a big mistake,' Reacher said. 'All you know, I might be a polite type of person. I might feel obligated to turn around and listen, whereupon I'd be pissing all over your shoes.'
The guy shuffled slightly, caught out. Clearly he had some kind of set speech prepared, which was what Reacher had been counting on. A little improvised interruption might slow him down some. Maybe enough to get zipped up and decent. The guy was still shuffling, deciding whether to react.
'So I guess it's down to me to tell you,' he said. 'Somebody's got to.'
He wasn't reacting. No talent for repartee.
'Tell me what?' Reacher asked.
'How it is around here.'
Reacher paused a beat. The only problem with coffee was its diuretic effect.
'And how is it around here?' he asked.
'Around here, you don't bring beaners into decent folks' places.'
'What?' Reacher said.
'What part don't you understand?'
Reacher breathed out. Maybe ten seconds to go.
'I didn't understand any of it,' he said.
'You don't bring beaners in a place like this.'
'What's a beaner?' Reacher asked.
The guy took a step forward. His reflection grew disproportionately larger.
'Latinos,' he said. 'Eat beans all the time.'
'Latina,' Reacher said. 'With an _a_. Gender counts with inflected languages. And she had iced coffee. Haven't seen her eat a bean all day.'
'You some kind of a smart guy?'
Reacher finished and zipped up with a sigh. Didn't flush. A place like that, it didn't seem like standard practice. He just turned to the sink and operated the faucet.
'Well, I'm smarter than you,' he said. 'That's for damn sure. But then, that's not saying much. This roll of paper towels is smarter than you. A lot smarter. Each sheet on its own is practically a genius, compared to you. They could stroll into Harvard, one by one, full scholarships for each of them, while you're still struggling with your GED.'
It was like taunting a dinosaur. Some kind of a brontosaurus, where the brain is a very long distance from anyplace else. The sound went in, and some time later it was received and understood. Four or five seconds, until it showed in the guy's face. Four or five seconds after that, he swung with his right. It was a ponderous slow swing with a big bunched fist on the end of a big heavy arm, aiming wide and high for Reacher's head. It could have caused some damage, if it had landed. But it didn't land. Reacher caught the guy's wrist in his left palm and stopped the swing dead. A loud wet _smack_ sound echoed off the bathroom tile.
'The bacteria on this floor are smarter than you,' he said.
He twisted his hips ninety degrees so his groin was protected and he squeezed the guy's wrist with his hand. There had been a time when he could break bones by squeezing with his hand. It was more about blind determination than sheer strength.
But right then, he didn't feel it.
'This is your lucky day,' he said. 'All I know, you could be a cop. So I'm going to let you go.'
The guy was staring desperately at his wrist, watching it get crushed. The clammy flesh was swelling and going red.
'After you apologize,' Reacher said.
The guy stared on, four or five seconds. Like a dinosaur.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I apologize.'
'Not to me, asshole,' Reacher said. 'To the lady.'
The guy said nothing. Reacher turned up the pressure. Felt his thumb go slick with sweat, sliding up over the tip of his index finger. Felt the bones in the guy's wrist click and move. The radius and the ulna, getting closer than nature intended.
'OK,' the guy gasped. 'Enough.'
Reacher released the wrist. The guy snatched it back and cradled his hand, panting, looking up, looking down.
'Give me the keys to your truck,' Reacher said.
The guy twisted awkwardly to get into his right pocket with his left hand. Held out a large bunch of keys.
'Now go wait for me in the parking lot,' Reacher said.
The guy unlocked the door left-handed and shuffled out. Reacher dropped the keys in the unflushed urinal and washed his hands again. Dried them carefully with the paper towels and left the bathroom behind him. He found the guy out in the lot, halfway between the diner door and the Cadillac.
'Be real nice, now,' Reacher called to him. 'Maybe offer to wash her car or something. She'll say no, but it's the thought that counts, right? If you're creative enough, you get your keys back. Otherwise, you're walking home.'
He could see through the tinted glass that she was watching them approach, not understanding. He motioned with his hand that she should let her window down. A circular motion, like winding a handle. She buzzed the glass down, maybe two inches, just wide enough to frame her eyes. They were wide and worried.
'This guy's got something to say to you,' Reacher said.
He stepped back. The guy stepped up. Looked down at the ground, and then back at Reacher, like a whipped dog. Reacher nodded, encouragingly. The guy put his hand on his chest, like an operatic tenor or a fancy maître d'. Bent slightly from the waist, to address the two-inch gap in the glass.
'Ma'am,' he said. 'Just wanted to say we'd all be real pleased if y'all would come back real soon, and would you like me to wash your car, seeing as you're here right now?'
'What?' she said.
They both turned separately to Reacher, the guy pleading, Carmen astonished.
'Beat it,' he said. 'I left your keys in the bathroom.'
Four, five seconds later, the guy was back on his way to the diner. Reacher stepped around the hood to his door. Pulled it open.
'I thought you were running out on me,' Carmen said. 'I thought you'd asked that guy for a ride.'
'I'd rather ride with you,' he said.
The Crown Victoria drove south to a lonely crossroads hamlet. There was an old diner on the right and a vacant lot on the left. A melted stop line on the road. Then a decrepit gas station, and opposite it a one-room schoolhouse. Dust and heat shimmer everywhere. The big car slowed and crawled through the junction at walking pace. It rolled past the school gate and then suddenly picked up speed and drove away.
Little Ellie Greer watched it go. She was in a wooden chair at the schoolroom window, halfway through raising the lid of her big blue lunch box. She heard the brief shriek of rubber as the car accelerated. She turned her head and stared after it. She was a serious, earnest child, much given to silent observation. She kept her big dark eyes on the road until the dust settled. Then she turned back to matters in hand and inspected her lunch, and wished her mom had been home to pack it, instead of the maid, who belonged to the Greers and was mean.
THREE
'What happened a year and a half ago?' Reacher asked.
She didn't answer. They were on a long straight deserted road, with the sun just about dead-centre above them. Heading south and near noon, he figured. The road was made of patched blacktop, smooth enough, but the shoulders were ragged. There were lonely billboards at random intervals, advertising gas and accommodations and markets many miles ahead. Either side of the road the landscape was flat and parched and featureless, dotted here and there with still windmills in the middle distance. There were automobile engines mounted on concrete pads, closer to the road. Big V-8s, like you would see under the hood of an ancient Chevrolet or Chrysler, painted yellow and streaked with rust, with stubby black exhaust pipes standing vertically.
'Water pumps,' Carmen said. 'For irrigating the fields. There was agriculture here, in the old days. Back then, gasoline was cheaper than water, so those things ran all day and all night. Now there's no water left, and gas has gotten too expensive.'
The land fell away on every side, covered with dry brush. On the far horizon southwest of the endless road, there might have been mountains a hundred miles away. Or it might have been a trick of the heat.
'Are you hungry?' she asked. 'If we don't stop we could pick Ellie up from school, and I'd really like to do that. I haven't seen her since yesterday.'
'Whatever you want,' Reacher said.
She accelerated until the big Cadillac was doing eighty and wallowing heavily over the undulations in the road. He straightened in his seat and tightened his belt against the reel. She glanced across at him.
'Do you believe me yet?' she asked.
He glanced back at her. He had spent thirteen years as an investigator, and his natural instinct was to believe nothing at all.
'What happened a year and a half ago?' he asked. 'Why did he stop?'
She adjusted her grip on the wheel. Opened her palms, stretched her fingers, closed them tight again on the rim.
'He went to prison,' she said.
'For beating up on you?'
'In _Texas_?' she said. She laughed, just a yelp, like a short cry of pain. 'Now I know you're new here.'
He said nothing. Just watched Texas reel in through the windshield ahead of him, hot and brassy and yellow.
'It just doesn't happen,' she said. 'In Texas a gentleman would never raise his hand to a woman. Everybody knows that. Especially not a _white_ gentleman whose family has been here over a hundred years. So if a greaseball whore wife dared to claim a thing like that, they'd lock _her_ up, probably in a rubber room.'
The day her life changed for ever.
'So what did he do?'
'He evaded federal taxes,' she said. 'He made a lot of money trading oil leases and selling drilling equipment down in Mexico. He neglected to tell the IRS about it. In fact, he neglected to tell the IRS about anything. One day they caught him.'
'They put you in jail for that?'
She made a face. 'Actually, they try hard not to. A first-time thing like that, they were willing to let him pay, you know, make proposals and so forth. A clean breast and a pay-back plan is what they're looking for. But Sloop was way too stubborn for that. He made them dig everything out for themselves. He was hiding things right up to the trial. He refused to pay anything. He even disputed that he owed them anything, which was ridiculous. And all the money was hidden behind family trusts, so they couldn't just take it. It made them mad, I think.'
'So they prosecuted?'
She nodded at the wheel. 'With a vengeance,' she said. 'A federal case. You know that expression? Making a federal case out of something? Now I see why people say that. Biggest fuss you ever saw. A real contest, the local good old boys against the Treasury Department. Sloop's lawyer is his best friend from high school, and his other best friend from high school is the DA in Pecos county, and he was advising them on strategy and stuff like that, but the IRS just rolled right over all of them. It was a massacre. He got three to five years. The judge set the minimum at thirty months in jail. And cut me a break.'
Reacher said nothing. She accelerated past a truck, the first vehicle they had seen in more than twenty miles.
'I was so happy,' she said. 'I'll never forget it. A white-collar thing like that, after the verdict came in they just told him to present himself at the federal prison the next morning. They didn't drag him away in handcuffs or anything. He came home and packed a little suitcase. We had a big family meal, stayed up kind of late. Went upstairs, and that was the last time he hit me. Next morning, his friends drove him up to the jail, someplace near Abilene. A Club Fed is what they call it. Minimum security. It's supposed to be comfortable. I heard you can play tennis there.'
'Do you visit him?'
She shook her head. 'I pretend he's dead,' she said.
She went quiet, and the car sped on toward the haze on the horizon. There _were_ mountains visible to the southwest, unimaginably distant.
'The Trans-Pecos,' she said. 'Watch for the light to change colour. It's very beautiful.'
He looked ahead, but the light was so bright it had no colour at all.
'Minimum thirty months is two and a half years,' she said. 'I thought it safest to bet on the minimum. He's probably behaving himself in there.'
Reacher nodded. 'Probably.'
'So, two and a half years,' she said. 'I wasted the first one and a half.'
'You've still got twelve months. That's plenty of time for anything.'
She was quiet again. 'Talk me through it,' she said. 'We have to agree on what needs to be done. That's important. That way, you're seeing it exactly the same way I am.'
He said nothing.
'Help me,' she said. 'Please. Just theoretically for now, if you want.'
He shrugged. Then he thought about it, from her point of view. From his, it was too easy. Disappearing and living invisibly was second nature to him.
'You need to get away,' he said. 'An abusive marriage, that's all a person can do, I guess. So, a place to live, and an income. That's what you need.'
'Doesn't sound much, when you say it.'
'Any big city,' he said. 'They have shelters. All kinds of organizations.'
'What about Ellie?'
'The shelters have babysitters,' he said. 'They'll look after her while you're working. There are lots of kids in those places. She'd have friends. And after a little while you could get a place of your own.'
'What job could I get?'
'Anything,' he said. 'You can read and write. You went to college.'
'How do I get there?'
'On a plane, on a train, in a bus. Two one-way tickets.'
'I don't have any money.'
'None at all?'
She shook her head. 'What little I had ran out a week ago.'
He looked away.
'What?' she said.
'You dress pretty sharp for a person with no money.'
'Mail order,' she said. 'I have to get approval from Sloop's lawyer. He signs the cheques. So I've got clothes. But what I haven't got is cash.'
'You could sell the diamond.'
'I tried to,' she said. 'It's a fake. He told me it was real, but it's stainless steel and cubic zirconium. The jeweller laughed at me. It's worth maybe thirty bucks.'
He paused a beat. 'There must be money in the house,' he said. 'You could steal some.'
She went quiet again, another fast mile south.
'Then I'm a double fugitive,' she said. 'You're forgetting about Ellie's legal status. And that's the whole problem. Always has been. Because she's Sloop's child, too. If I transport her across a state line without his consent, then I'm a kidnapper. They'll put her picture on milk cartons, and they'll find me, and they'll take her away from me, and I'll go to jail. They're very strict about it. Taking children out of a failed marriage is the number one reason for kidnapping today. The lawyers all warned me. They all say I need Sloop's agreement. And I'm not going to get it, am I? How can I even go up there and ask him if he'd consent to me disappearing for ever with his baby? Someplace he'll never find either of us?'
'So don't cross the state line. Stay in Texas. Go to Dallas.'
'I'm not staying in Texas,' she said.
She said it with finality. Reacher said nothing back.
'It's not easy,' she said. 'His mother watches me, on his behalf. That's why I didn't go ahead and sell the ring, even though I could have used the thirty bucks. She'd notice, and it would put her on her guard. She'd know what I'm planning. She's smart. So if one day money is missing and Ellie is missing, I might get a few hours' start before she calls the sheriff and the sheriff calls the FBI. But a few hours isn't too much help, because Texas is real big, and buses are real slow. I wouldn't make it out.'
'Got to be some way,' he said.
She glanced back at her briefcase on the rear seat. The legal paperwork.
'There are lots of ways,' she said. 'Procedures, provisions, wards of the court, all kinds of things. But lawyers are slow, and very expensive, and I don't have any money. There are pro-bono people who do it for free, but they're always very busy. It's a mess. A big, complicated mess.'
'I guess it is,' he said.
'But it should be possible in a year,' she said. 'A year's a long time, right?'
'So?'
'So I need you to forgive me for wasting the first year and a half. I need you to understand why. It was all so daunting, I kept putting it off. I was safe. I said to myself, plenty of time to go. You just agreed, twelve months is plenty of time for anything. So even if I was starting from cold, right now, I could be excused for that, right? Nobody could say I'd left it too late, could they?'
There was a polite beep from somewhere deep inside the dashboard. A little orange light started flashing in the stylized shape of a gas pump, right next to the speedometer.
'Low fuel,' she said.
'There's Exxon up ahead,' he said. 'I saw a billboard. Maybe fifteen miles.'
'I need Mobil,' she said. 'There's a card for Mobil in the glove box. I don't have any way of paying at Exxon.'
'You don't even have money for gas?'
She shook her head. 'I ran out. Now I'm charging it all to my mother-in-law's Mobil account. She won't get the bill for a month.'
She steered one-handed and groped behind her for her pocketbook. Dragged it forward and dumped it on his lap.
'Check it out,' she said.
He sat there, with the bag on his knees.
'I can't be poking through a lady's pocketbook,' he said.
'I want you to,' she said. 'I need you to understand.'
He paused a beat and snapped it open and a soft aroma came up at him. Perfume and makeup. There was a hairbrush, tangled with long black hairs. A nail clipper. And a thin wallet.
'Check it out,' she said again.
There was a worn dollar bill in the money section. That was all. A solitary buck. No credit cards. A Texas driver's licence, with a startled picture of her on it. There was a plastic window with a photograph of a little girl behind it. She was slightly chubby, with perfect pink skin. Shiny blond hair and bright lively eyes. A radiant smile filled with tiny square teeth.
'Ellie,' she said.
'She's very cute.'
'She is, isn't she?'
'Where did you sleep last night?'
'In the car,' she said. 'Motels are forty bucks.'
'Mine was nearer twenty,' he said.
She shrugged. 'Anything over a dollar, I haven't got it, so it's the car for me. It's comfortable enough. Then I wait for the breakfast rush and was hup in some diner's restroom, when they're too busy to notice.'
'What about eating?'
'I don't eat.'
She was slowing down, maybe trying to preserve the rest of her gas.
'I'll pay for it,' Reacher said. 'You're giving me a ride.'
There was another billboard, on the right shoulder. Exxon, ten miles.
'OK,' she said. 'I'll let you pay. But only so I can get back to Ellie.'
She accelerated again, confident the tank would last ten miles. Less than a gallon, Reacher figured, even with a big old engine like that. Even driving fast. He sat back and watched the horizon reel in. Then he suddenly realized what he should do.
'Stop the car,' he said.
'Why?'
'Just do it, OK?'
She glanced at him, puzzled, but she pulled over on the ragged shoulder. Left it with two wheels on the blacktop, the engine running, the air blasting.
'Now wait,' he said.
They waited in the cold until the truck she had passed came through.
'Now sit still,' he said.
He unclipped his seat belt and squinted down and tore the pocket off his shirt. Cheap material, weak stitching, it came away with no trouble at all.
'What are you wearing?' he asked.
'What? What are you doing?'
'Tell me exactly what you're wearing.'
She blushed. Fidgeted nervously. 'This dress,' she said. 'And underwear. And shoes.'
'Show me your shoes.'
She paused a second, and then leaned down and worked her shoes off. Passed them across to him, one at a time. He checked them carefully. Nothing in them. He passed them back. Then he leaned forward and unbuttoned his shirt. Took it off. Passed it to her.
'I'm getting out now,' he said. 'I'm going to turn my back. Take all your clothes off and put the shirt on. Leave your clothes on the seat and then get out, too.'
'Why?'
'You want me to help you, just do it. All of them, OK?'
He got out of the car and walked away. Turned around and stared down the road, back the way they had come. It was very hot. He could feel the sun burning the skin on his shoulders. Then he heard the car door open. He turned back and saw her climbing out, barefoot, wearing his shirt. It was huge on her. She was hopping from foot to foot, because the road was burning her feet.
'You can keep your shoes,' he called.
She leaned in and picked them up and put them on.
'Now walk away and wait,' he called.
She paused again, and then moved ten feet away. He stepped back to the car. Her clothes were neatly folded on her seat. He ignored them. Reached back and searched her pocketbook again, and then the briefcase. Nothing there. He turned back to the clothes and shook them out. They were warm from her body. The dress, a bra, underpants. Nothing hidden in them. He laid them on the roof of the car and searched the rest of it.
It took him twenty minutes. He covered it completely. Under the hood, the whole of the interior, under the carpets, in the seats, under the seats, in the trunk, under the fenders, everywhere. He found nothing at all, and he was absolutely prepared to bet his life no civilian could conceal anything from him in an automobile.
'OK,' he called. 'Get dressed now. Same routine.'
He waited with his back turned until he heard her behind him. She was holding his shirt. He took it from her and put it back on.
'What was that about?' she asked.
'Now I'll help you,' he said. 'Because now I believe you.'
'Why?'
'Because you really don't have any money,' he said. 'No credit cards, either. Not in your wallet, and not hidden anyplace else. And nobody travels three hundred miles from home, not overnight, with absolutely no money. Not unless they've got some real big problems. And a person with real big problems deserves some kind of help.'
She said nothing. Just ducked her head slightly, like she was accepting a compliment. Or offering one. They climbed back in the car and shut the doors. Sat for a minute in the cool air, and then she manoeuvred back onto the road again.
'So, you've got a year,' he said. 'That's plenty of time. A year from now, you could be a million miles away. New start, new life. Is that what you want me for? To help you get away?'
She said nothing for a couple of minutes. A couple of miles. The road rolled down a slight hill, and then up again. There were buildings in the far distance, on the next crest. Probably the gas station. Maybe a tow-truck operation next to it.
'Right now just agree with me,' she said. 'A year is enough. So it's OK to have waited.'
'Sure,' he said. 'A year is enough. It's OK to have waited.'
She said nothing more. Just drove straight ahead for the gas station, like her life depended on it.
The first establishment was a junkyard. There was a long low shed made out of corrugated tin, with the front wall all covered with old hubcaps. Behind it was an acre of wrecked cars. They were piled five or six deep, with the older models at the bottom, like geological strata. Beyond the low shed was the turn for the gas station. It was old enough to have pumps with pointers instead of figures, and four public rest rooms instead of two. Old enough that a taciturn guy came out into the heat and filled your car for you.
The Cadillac took more than twenty gallons, which cost Reacher the price of a motel room. He passed the bills through his window and waved away a dollar in change. He figured the guy should have it. The outside temperature reading on the dash showed one hundred and eleven degrees. No wonder the guy didn't talk. Then he found himself wondering whether it was because the guy didn't like to see a beaner driving a white man around in a Cadillac.
' _Gracias, señor_ ,' Carmen said. 'Thank you.'
'Pleasure,' he said. ' _De nada, señorita_.'
'You speak Spanish?'
'Not really,' he said. 'I served all over, so I can say a few words in a lot of languages. But that's all. Except French. I speak French pretty well. My mother was French.'
'From Louisiana or Canada?'
'From Paris, France.'
'So you're half foreign,' she said.
'Sometimes I feel a lot more than half.'
She smiled like she didn't believe him and eased back to the road. The gas needle jumped up to F, which seemed to reassure her. She got the car straight in her lane and accelerated back to a cruise.
'But you should call me señora,' she said. 'Not señorita. I'm a married woman.'
'Yes,' he said. 'I guess you are.'
She went quiet for a mile. Settled back in the seat and rested both hands lightly on the bottom curve of the wheel. Then she took a deep breath.
'OK, here's the problem,' she said. 'I don't have a year.'
'Why not?'
'Because a month ago his lawyer friend came out to the house. Told us there was some kind of deal on the table.'
'What deal?'
'I don't know for sure. Nobody told me exactly. My guess is Sloop's going to rat out some business associates in exchange for early remission. I think his other friend is brokering it through the DA's office.'
'Shit,' Reacher said.
Carmen nodded. 'Yes, shit. They've all been working their asses off, getting it going. I've had to be all smiles, like oh great, Sloop's coming home early.'
Reacher said nothing.
'But inside, I'm screaming,' she said. 'I left it too late, you see. A year and a half, I did nothing at all. I thought I was safe. I was wrong. I was stupid. I was sitting around in a trap without knowing it, and now it's sprung shut, and I'm still in it.'
Reacher nodded slowly. _Hope for the best, plan for the worst_. That was his guiding principle.
'So what's the progress on the deal?' he asked.
The car sped on south.
'It's done,' she said, in a small voice.
'So when does he get out?'
'Today's Friday,' she said. 'I don't think they can do it at the weekend. So it'll be Monday, I expect. A couple of days, is all.'
'I see,' Reacher said.
'So I'm scared,' she said. 'He's coming home.'
'I see,' Reacher said again.
'Do you?' she asked.
He said nothing.
'Monday night,' she said. 'He's going to start it all up again. It's going to be worse than ever.'
'Maybe he's changed,' Reacher said. 'Prison can change people.'
It was a useless thing to say. He could see it in her face. And in his experience, prison didn't change people for the better.
'No, it's going to be worse than ever,' she said. 'I know it. I know it for sure. I'm in big trouble, Reacher. I can promise you that.'
Something in her voice.
'Why?'
She moved her hands on the wheel. Closed her eyes tight, even though she was doing seventy miles an hour.
'Because it was me who told the IRS about him,' she said.
The Crown Victoria drove south, and then west, and then looped back north in a giant sweeping curve. It detoured over near the highway so it could fill up with gas at a self-service pump in a busy station. The driver used a stolen Amex card in the slot and then wiped his prints off it and dropped it in the trash next to the pump, with the empty oil bottles and the soda cans and the used paper towels covered with windshield dirt. The woman busied herself with a map and selected their next destination. Kept her finger on the spot until the driver got back in and squirmed round to take a look at it.
'Now?' he asked.
'Just to check it out,' she replied. 'For later.'
'It seemed like such a good plan,' Carmen said. 'It seemed foolproof. I knew how stubborn he was, and how greedy he was, so I knew he wouldn't co-operate with them, so I knew he would go to jail, at least for a little while. Even if by some chance he didn't, I thought it might preoccupy him for a spell. And I thought it might shake some money loose for me, you know, when he was hiding it all. And it worked real well, apart from the money. But that seemed like such a small thing at the time.'
'How did you do it?'
'I just called them. They're in the book. They have a whole section to take information from spouses. It's one of their big ways to get people. Normally it happens during divorces, when you're mad at each other. But I was already mad at him.'
'Why haven't you gone ahead and _got_ a divorce?' he asked. 'Husband in jail is grounds, right? Some kind of desertion?'
She glanced in the mirror, at the briefcase on the rear seat.
'It doesn't solve the problem with Ellie,' she said. 'In fact, it makes it much worse. It alerts everybody to the possibility I'll leave the state. Legally, Sloop could require me to register her whereabouts, and I'm sure he would.'
'You could stay in Texas,' he said again.
She nodded. 'I know, I know,' she said. 'But I can't. I just can't. I know I'm being irrational, but I can't stay here, Reacher. It's a beautiful state, and there _are_ nice people here, and it's very big, so I could get a long way away, but it's a _symbol_. Things have happened to me here that I have to get away from. Not just with Sloop.'
He shrugged. 'Your call,' he said.
She went quiet and concentrated on driving. The road reeled in. It was dropping down off of a wide flat mesa that looked the size of Rhode Island.
'The caprock,' she said. 'It's limestone, or something. All the water evaporated about a million years ago and left the rock behind. Geological deposits, or something.'
She sounded vague. Her tour-guide explanation was less definitive than usual.
'So what do you want me to do?' he asked.
'I don't know,' she said, although he was certain that she did.
'Help you run? I could do that, probably.'
She said nothing.
'You picked me out,' he said. 'You must have had something in mind.'
She said nothing. He fell to thinking about the potential target group she had outlined to him. Out-of-work rodeo riders and roughnecks. Men of various talents, but he wasn't sure if beating a federal manhunt would be among them. So she had chosen well. Or lucked out.
'You need to move fast,' he said. 'Two days, you need to get started right now. We should pick Ellie up and turn the car around and get going. Vegas, maybe, for the first stop.'
'And do what there?'
'Pick up some ID,' he said. 'Place like Vegas, we could find something, even if it's only temporary. I've got some money. I can get more, if you need it.'
'I can't take your money,' she said. 'That wouldn't be fair.'
'Fair or not, you're going to need money. You can pay me back later. Then maybe you should go back to LA. You could start building some new paperwork there.'
She was quiet again, another mile.
'No, I can't run,' she said. 'I can't be a fugitive. I can't be an _illegal_. Whatever else I am, I've never been an illegal. I'm not going to start being one now. And neither is Ellie. She deserves better than that.'
'You both deserve better than that,' he said. 'But you've got to do something.'
'I'm a citizen,' she said. 'Think about what that means to a person like me. I'm not going to give it up. I'm not going to pretend to be somebody else.'
'So what's your plan?'
'You're my plan,' she said.
Bull riders, roughnecks, a six-foot-five two-hundred-fifty-pound ex-military cop.
'You want me to be your _bodyguard_?' he asked.
She made no reply.
'Carmen, I'm sorry about your situation,' he said. 'Believe me, I really am.'
No response.
'But I can't be your bodyguard.'
No reply.
'I can't be,' he said again. 'It's ridiculous. What do you think is going to happen? You think I'm going to be with you twenty-four hours a day? Seven days a week? Making sure he doesn't hit you?'
No reply. A huge highway interchange sprawled across the empty landscape, miles away in the haze.
'It's ridiculous,' he said again. 'I could warn him off, I guess. I could scare him. I could smack him around a little, to back up the message. But what happens when I'm gone? Because sooner or later I'm going to be gone, Carmen. I'm not going to stay around. I don't like to stay anywhere. And it's not just me. Face it, _nobody's_ going to stay around. Not long enough. Not ten years. Or twenty, or thirty or however long it is until he ups and dies of old age.'
No reply. No effect, either. It wasn't like what he was saying was a big disappointment to her. She just listened and drove, fast and smooth, and silent, like she was biding her time. The highway cloverleaf grew larger and nearer and she swooped onto it and around it and headed due west, following a big green sign which said: _Pecos 75 miles_.
'I don't want a bodyguard,' she said. 'I agree, that would be ridiculous.'
'So what am I supposed to be for?'
She settled onto the highway, centre lane, driving faster than before. He watched her face. It was completely blank.
'What am I supposed to be for?' he asked again.
She hesitated. 'I can't say it.'
'Say what?'
She opened her mouth. Closed it again. Swallowed hard, and said nothing. He stared at her. _Bull riders, roughnecks, an ex-MP. Clay Allison's grave, the fancy inscription, the obituary in the Kansas City newspaper_.
'You _are_ crazy,' he said.
'Am I?' The spots of colour came back to her face, the size of quarters, burning red high above her cheekbones.
'Totally crazy,' he said. 'And you can forget about it.'
'I _can't_ forget about it.'
He said nothing.
'I want him dead, Reacher,' she said. 'I really do. It's my only way out, literally. And he deserves it.'
'Tell me you're kidding.'
'I'm not kidding,' she said. 'I want him killed.'
He shook his head. Stared out of the window. 'Just forget all about it,' he said. 'It's absurd. This isn't the Wild West any more.'
'Isn't it? Isn't it still OK to kill a man who needs killing?'
Then she went quiet, just driving, like she was waiting him out. He stared at the speeding landscape in front of him. They were heading for the distant mountains. The blazing afternoon sun made them red and purple. It changed the colour of the air. The Trans-Pecos, she had called them.
'Please, Reacher,' she said. 'Please. At least think about it.'
He said nothing. _Please? Think about it?_ He was beyond reaction. He dropped his eyes from the mountains and watched the highway. It was busy with traffic. A river of cars and trucks, crawling across the vastness. She was passing them all, one after another. Driving way too fast.
'I'm not crazy,' she said. 'Please. I tried to do this right. I really did. Soon as his lawyer told me about the deal, I saw a lawyer of my own, and then three more, and none of them could do anything for me as fast as a month. All they could do was tell me Ellie traps me exactly where I am. So then I looked for protection. I asked private detectives. They wouldn't do anything for me. I went to a security firm in Austin and they said yes, they could guard me around the clock, but it would be six men and nearly ten thousand dollars a week. Which is the same thing as saying no. So I tried, Reacher. I tried to do it right. But it's impossible.'
He said nothing.
'So I bought a gun,' she said.
'Wonderful,' he said.
'And bullets,' she said. 'It took all the cash I had.'
'You picked the wrong guy,' he said.
'But why? You've killed people before. In the Army. You told me that.'
'This is different.'
'How?'
'This would be murder. Cold-blooded murder. It would be an assassination.'
'No, it would be just the same. Just like the Army.'
He shook his head. 'Carmen, it wouldn't be the same.'
'Don't you take an oath or something? To protect people?'
'It's not the same,' he said again.
She passed an eighteen-wheeler bound for the coast, and the Cadillac rocked and shimmied through the superheated turbulent air.
'Slow down,' he said.
She shook her head. 'I can't slow down. I want to see Ellie.'
He touched the dashboard in front of him, steadying himself. The freezing air from the vents blasted against his chest.
'Don't worry,' she said. 'I'm not going to crash. Ellie needs me. If it wasn't for Ellie, I'd have crashed a long time ago, believe me.'
But she eased off a little, anyway. The big rig crept back alongside.
'I know this is a difficult conversation,' she said.
'You think?'
'But you have to look at it from my point of view. Please, Reacher. I've been through it a million times. I've thought it through. I've been from A to B to C to D, all the way to Z. Then again, and again. And again. I've examined all the options. So this is all logical to me. And this is the only way. I _know_ that. But it's hard to talk about, because it's new to you. You haven't thought about it before. It comes out of the blue. So I sound crazy and cold-blooded to you. I know that. I appreciate that. But I'm not crazy or cold-blooded. It's just that I've had the time to reach the conclusion, and you haven't. And this is the only conclusion, I promise you.'
'Whatever, I'm not killing a guy I never saw before.'
'He hits me, Reacher,' she said. 'He beats me, badly. Punches me, kicks me, hurts me. He enjoys it. He laughs while he does it. I live in fear, all the time.'
'So go to the cops.'
'The cop. There's only one. And he wouldn't believe me. And even if he did, he wouldn't do anything about it. They're all big buddies. You don't know how it is here.'
Reacher said nothing.
'He's coming home,' she said. 'Can you _imagine_ what he's going to do to me?'
He said nothing.
'I'm _trapped_ , Reacher. I'm boxed in, because of Ellie. Do you see that?'
He said nothing.
'Why won't you help me? Is it the money? Is it because I can't pay you?'
He said nothing.
'I'm desperate,' she said. 'You're my only chance. I'm begging you. Why won't you do it? Is it because I'm Mexican?'
He said nothing.
'It's because I'm just a greaseball, right? A beaner? You'd do it for a white woman? Like your girlfriend? I bet she's a white woman. Probably a blonde, right?'
'Yes, she's a blonde,' he said.
'Some guy was beating up on her, you'd kill him.'
_Yes, I would_ , he thought.
'And _she_ ran off to Europe without you. Didn't want you to go with her. But you'd do it for her, and you won't do it for me.'
'It's not the same,' he said for the third time.
'I know,' she said. 'Because I'm just beaner trash. I'm not worth it.'
He said nothing.
'What's her name?' she asked. 'Your girlfriend?'
'Jodie,' he said.
'OK, imagine Jodie over there in Europe. She's trapped in some bad situation, getting beat up every day by some maniac sadist. She tells you all about it. Bares her soul. Every horrible humiliating detail. What are you going to do?'
_Kill him_ , he thought.
She nodded like she could read his mind. 'But you won't do that for me. You'd do it for the gringa, but not for me.'
He paused a beat with his mouth halfway open. It was true. He would do it for Jodie Garber, but he wouldn't do it for Carmen Greer. _Why not?_ Because it comes in a rush. You can't force it. It's a hot-blooded thing, like a drug in your veins, and you go with it. If it's not there, you can't go with it. Simple as that. He'd gone with it before in his life, many times. People mess with him, they get what they get. They mess with Jodie, that's the same thing as messing with him. Because Jodie _was_ him. Or at least she used to be. In a way that Carmen wasn't. And never would be. So it just wasn't _there_.
'It's not about gringas or latinas,' he said quietly.
She said nothing.
'Please, Carmen,' he said. 'You need to understand that.'
'So what _is_ it about?'
'It's about I know her and I don't know you.'
'And that makes a difference?'
'Of course it does.'
'Then get to know me,' she said. 'We've got two days. You're about to meet my daughter. Get to know us.'
He said nothing. She drove on. _Pecos 55 miles_.
'You were a policeman,' she said. 'You should want to help people. Or are you scared? Is that it? Are you a coward?'
He said nothing.
'You could do it,' she said. 'You've done it before. So you know how. You could do it and get clean away. You could dump his body where nobody would find it. Out in the desert. Nobody would ever know. It wouldn't come back on you, if you were careful. You'd never get caught. You're smart enough.'
He said nothing.
'Are you smart enough? Do you know how? Do you?'
'Of course I know how,' he said. 'But I won't do it.'
'Why not?'
'I told you why not. Because I'm not an assassin.'
'But I'm desperate,' she said. 'I need you to do this. I'm begging you. I'll do anything if you'll help me.'
He said nothing.
'What do you want, Reacher? You want sex? We could do that.'
'Stop the car,' he said.
'Why?'
'Because I've had enough of this.'
She jammed her foot down hard on the gas. The car leapt forward. He glanced back at the traffic and leaned over toward her and knocked the transmission into N. The engine unloaded and screamed and the car coasted and slowed. He used his left hand on the wheel and hauled it around against her desperate grip and steered the car to the shoulder. It bounced off the blacktop and the gravel bit against the tyres and the speed washed away. He jammed the lever into P and opened his door, all in one movement. The car skidded to a stop with the transmission locked. He slid out and stood up unsteadily. Felt the heat on his body like a blow from a hammer and slammed the door and walked away from her.
FOUR
He was sweating heavily twenty yards after getting out of the car. And already regretting his decision. He was in the middle of nowhere, on foot on a major highway, and the slowest vehicles were doing sixty. Nobody was going to want to stop for him. Even if they did want to, give them a little reaction time, give them a little time to check their mirrors, a little braking time, they'd be more than a mile away before they knew it, and then they'd shrug their shoulders and speed up again and keep on going. _Dumb place to hitch a ride_ , they'd think.
It was worse than dumb. It was suicidal. The sun was fearsome and the temperature was easily a hundred and twelve degrees. The slipstream from the cars was like a hot gale, and the suction from the giant trucks wasn't far from pulling him off his feet. He had no water. He could barely breathe. There was a constant stream of people five yards away, but he was as alone as if he was stumbling blind through the desert. If a state trooper didn't come by and arrest him for jaywalking, he could die out there.
He turned and saw the Cadillac, still sitting inert on the shoulder. But he kept on walking away from it. He made it about fifty yards and stopped. Turned to face east and stuck out his thumb. But it was hopeless, like he knew it would be. After five minutes, a hundred vehicles, the nearest thing he'd gotten to a response was some trucker blasting his air horn, a huge bass sound roaring past him with a whine of stressed tyres and a hurricane of dust and grit. He was choking and burning up.
He turned again. Saw the Cadillac lurch backward and start up the shoulder toward him. Her steering was imprecise. The rear end was all over the place. It was close to slewing out into the traffic. He started walking back to it. It came on to meet him, fishtailing wildly. He started running. He stopped alongside the car as she braked hard. The suspension bounced. She buzzed the passenger window down.
'I'm sorry,' she said.
He didn't hear it in the noise, but he caught the shape of the words.
'Get in,' she said.
His shirt was sticking to his back. He had grit in his eyes. The howl of sound from the road was deafening him.
'Get in,' she mouthed. 'I'm sorry.'
He got in. It felt exactly the same as the first time. The air roaring, the freezing leather seat. The small cowed woman at the wheel.
'I apologize,' she said. 'I'm sorry. I said stupid things.'
He slammed the door. There was sudden silence. He put his hand in the chill stream from the vents.
'I didn't mean them,' she said.
'Whatever,' he said back.
'Really, I didn't mean them. I'm just so desperate I can't tell right from wrong any more. And I'm very sorry for the thing about the sex. It was a crass thing to say.'
Then her voice went small. 'It's just that some of the guys I've picked up, I figured that was what it was going to have to be.'
'You'd have sex with them so they'd kill your husband?'
She nodded. 'I told you, I'm trapped and I'm scared and I'm desperate. And I don't have anything else to offer.'
He said nothing.
'And I've seen movies where that happens,' she said.
He nodded back. 'I've seen those movies, too,' he said. 'They never get away with it.'
She paused a long moment.
'So you're not going to do it,' she said, like a statement of fact.
'No, I'm not,' he said.
She paused again, longer.
'OK, I'll let you out in Pecos,' she said. 'You can't be out there walking. You could die in heat like this.'
He paused too, much longer than she had. Then he shook his head. Because he had to be _somewhere_. When you live on the road, you learn pretty quick that any one place is about as good as any other place.
'No, I'll come with you,' he said. 'I'll hang out a couple of days. Because I'm sorry about your situation, Carmen. I really am. Just because I won't walk in and shoot the guy doesn't mean I don't want to help you some other way. If I can. And if you still want me to, that is.'
She paused another beat. 'Yes, I still want you to,' she said.
'And I want to meet Ellie. She looks like a great kid, from her picture.'
'She is a great kid.'
'But I'm not going to murder her father.'
She said nothing.
'Is that completely clear?' he asked.
She nodded. 'I understand,' she said. 'I'm sorry I asked.'
'It's not just me, Carmen,' he said. 'Nobody would do it. You were fooling yourself. It wasn't a good plan.'
She looked small and lost.
'I thought nobody could refuse,' she said. 'If they knew.'
She turned and watched the traffic coming up behind her. Waited for a gap. Six cars later, she pulled back onto the highway and gunned the motor. Within a minute she was doing eighty again, passing one car after another. The trucker who had used his air horn as he left Reacher in the dust lasted seven whole minutes, before she reeled him in.
The Crown Victoria made it to the destination the woman had selected within eighty minutes. It was an inch-wide empty brown stain on the map, and it was a forty-mile-wide empty brown stain in reality. One road ran through it, meandering roughly north and east in the lee of distant mountains. Hot, lonely, valueless country. But it had all the features she had predicted. It would serve her purposes. She smiled to herself. She had an instinct for terrain.
'OK,' she said. 'First thing tomorrow. Right here.'
The big car turned and headed back south. The dust from its tyres hung in the air for long minutes and then floated down to the powdery ground.
Carmen came off the highway just short of Pecos and speared south on a small county road which led down into total emptiness. Within five miles, they could have been on the surface of the moon.
'Tell me about Echo,' he said.
She shrugged. 'What's to tell? It's nothing. When they were first mapping Texas a hundred years ago, the Census Bureau called a place settled if it had more than six people to the square mile, and we _still_ don't qualify. We're still the frontier.'
'But it's very beautiful,' he said.
And it was. The road was snaking and diving through endless contours, with red rock canyons either side of it, tall and noble to the east, fractured and pierced to the west where ancient streams had sought the banks of the Rio Grande. Tall dry mountains reared beyond, with an immense Technicolor sky above, and even in the speeding car he could sense the stunning silence of thousands of square miles of absolute emptiness.
'I hate it,' she said.
'Where will I be?' he asked.
'On the property. In the bunkhouse, I guess. They'll hire you for the horses. We're always a man short. You show up with a pulse, they'll be interested. You can say you're a wrangler. It'll be a good disguise. It'll keep you close by.'
'I don't know anything about horses.'
She shrugged. 'Maybe they won't notice. They don't notice much. Like me getting beaten half to death.'
An hour later, they were tight for time. She was driving fast enough that the tyre squeal from the curves was more or less continuous. They came up a long steep grade and then turned out between two rock pillars on a peak and suddenly there was flat land below them as far as the eye could see. The road fell away like a twisted tan ribbon and was crossed twenty miles ahead by another, just visible through the haze like a faint line on a map. The distant crossroads was studded with a handful of tiny buildings, and apart from them and the two roads there was no evidence humans had ever lived on the planet.
'Echo County,' she said. 'Everything you see, and a lot more besides. A thousand square miles, and a hundred and fifty people. Well, a hundred and forty-eight, because one of them is sitting right here with you, and one of them is still in jail.'
Her mood had improved, because she said it with a wry smile. But she was looking at a tiny plume of dust on the road far below them. It was puffing out like a squirrel's tail, crawling slowly south, a quarter of the way to the crossroads.
'That must be the school bus,' she said. 'We have to beat it to town, or Ellie will get on and we'll miss her.'
'Town?' Reacher said.
She smiled again, briefly. 'You're looking at it,' she said. 'Uptown Echo.'
She accelerated down the grade and the Cadillac's own dust swirled and hung behind it. The landscape was so vast that speed seemed slowed to absurdity. Reacher figured the bus might be a half-hour from the crossroads, and the Cadillac was travelling twice as fast, so they should catch it inside fifteen minutes, even though the elevation and the clear desert air made it look close enough to reach out and touch, like a child's toy on the floor of a room.
'It's good of you to be coming,' she said. 'Thank you. I mean it.'
' _No hay de qué, señorita_ ,' he said.
'So you do know more than a few words.'
He shrugged. 'There were a lot of Spanish-speaking people in the Army. Most of the new generation, in fact. Some of the best of them.'
'Like baseball,' she said.
'Yes,' he said. 'Like baseball.'
'But you should call me señora. Señorita makes me too happy.'
She accelerated again when the road levelled out and about a mile before they caught up with the bus she swung out into the wrong lane, ready to pass it. Safe enough, he figured. The chances of meeting oncoming traffic in that part of the world were worse than winning the lottery. She reeled in the bus and pulled through the cone of dust and blasted past and stayed on the left for another mile. Then she eased back right and five minutes later they were slowing as they approached the crossroads.
From ground level the hamlet looked ragged and defeated, the way small places do under the heat of the sun. There were lots partially overrun with dry thorny weeds, delineated with raw block walls, commercially zoned but never developed. There was a diner on the right on the northwest corner, nothing more than a long low shack made of wood with all the colour baked right out of it. Diagonally opposite it was the school, a one-room building like something out of a history book. _The beginnings of rural education_. Opposite that on the southwest corner was a gas station with two pumps and a small yard filled with stalled cars behind it. Diagonally opposite the gas station and across the road from the school the northeast corner was an empty lot, with concrete blocks spilled randomly across it, like an optimistic new venture had been planned and then abandoned, maybe while LBJ was still in office. There were four other buildings, all one-storey, all plain concrete, all set back with thin rough driveways leading to them from the road. Houses, Reacher guessed. Their yards were littered with junk, children's bikes and tired automobiles on blocks and old living room furniture. The yards were baked dry and hard and had low chicken wire fences around them, maybe to keep the big snakes out.
The crossroads itself had no stop signs, just thick lines on the blacktop, melted in the heat. Carmen drove straight through and past the school and U-turned across the full width of the road, bumping down into shallow drainage ditches on both shoulders. She came back and stopped with the school gate close to Reacher's window. The school yard was ringed by a wire hurricane fence like a dog pound, and the gate was an inexact hinged rectangle made of galvanized tubing and faced with the same wire.
She stared past him at the school door. The bus came labouring down from the north and stopped on its own side of the road, parallel to the Cadillac, facing the other direction. The schoolhouse door opened and a woman stepped out. She moved slow and looked tired. The teacher, Reacher guessed, ready to end her day. She saw the bus and waved to the children. They spilled out in a long stream. Seventeen of them, nine girls and eight boys, he counted. Ellie Greer was seventh in line. She was wearing a blue dress. She looked damp and hot. He recognized her from her photograph and by the way Carmen moved beside him. He heard her catch her breath and scrabble for the door handle.
She skipped around the hood and met her daughter outside the car on the beaten earth strip that passed for a sidewalk. She scooped her up in a wild hug. Spun her round and round. Her little feet wind milled outward and her blue lunch box swung and hit her mother on the back. Reacher could see the child laughing and tears in Carmen's eyes. They came back around the rear of the car clutched tight together. Carmen opened the door and Ellie scrambled straight into the driver's seat and stopped dead when she saw him. She went instantly silent and her eyes went wide.
'This is Mr Reacher,' Carmen said.
Ellie turned to look at her.
'He's my friend,' Carmen said. 'Say hello to him.'
Ellie turned back. 'Hello,' she said.
'Hey, Ellie,' Reacher said. 'School OK?'
Ellie paused. 'It was OK.'
'Learn anything?'
'How to spell some words.'
She paused again, and then tilted her chin upward a fraction. 'Not easy ones,' she said. 'Ball and fall.'
Reacher nodded gravely.
'Four letters,' he said. 'That's pretty tough.'
'I bet you can spell them.'
'B, A, L, L,' Reacher said. 'F, A, L, L. Like that, right?'
'You're grown up,' Ellie said, like he had passed a test. 'But you know what? The teacher said four letters, but there's only three, because the L comes twice. Right there at the end.'
'You're a smart kid,' Reacher said. 'Now hop in the back and let your mom in out of the heat.'
She scrambled past his left shoulder and he caught the smell of elementary school. He had attended maybe fifteen different places, most of them in different countries and continents, and they all smelled the same. It was more than thirty years since he had last been in one, but he still remembered it clearly.
'Mom?' Ellie said.
Carmen slid in and shut the door. She looked flushed. Heat, sudden exertion, sudden brief happiness, Reacher didn't know.
'Mom, it's hot,' Ellie said. 'We should get ice cream sodas. From the diner.'
Reacher saw Carmen about to smile and agree, and then he saw her glance back at her pocketbook and remember the lone dollar stashed inside it.
'From the diner, Mom,' Ellie said. 'Ice cream sodas. They're best when it's hot. Before we go home.'
Carmen's face fell, and then it fell a little farther when she caught up to the end of Ellie's sentence. _Home_. Reacher stepped into the silence.
'Good idea,' he said. 'Let's get ice cream sodas. My treat.'
Carmen glanced across, dependent on him and unhappy about it. But she put the car in drive anyway and pulled back through the crossroads and turned left into the diner's lot. She came around and parked in the shade tight against its north wall, right next to the only other car in the place, a steel blue Crown Victoria, new and shiny. Must be a state trooper's unmarked, or maybe a rental, Reacher thought.
The diner was cold inside, chilled by a big old-fashioned air conditioner that vented down through the roof. And it was empty, apart from a group Reacher took to be the Crown Victoria's occupants, a trio of ordinary indoor types at a window, two men and a woman. The woman was medium-blonde and pleasant-looking. One guy was small and dark and the other was taller and fair. So the Crown Vic was a rental, not a cop car, and these guys were maybe some kind of a sales team heading between San Antonio and El Paso. Maybe they had heavy samples in the trunk which prevented them from flying. He glanced away and let Ellie lead him toward a booth at the opposite end of the room.
'This is the best table,' she said. 'All the others have torn seats, and they've sewed them up, and the thread is kind of thick and it can hurt the back of your leg.'
'I guess you've been in here before,' Reacher said.
'Of course I have,' she giggled, like he was crazy. Rows of tiny square teeth flashed at him. 'I've been in here lots of times.'
Then she jumped up and scooted sideways over the vinyl.
'Mommy, sit next to me,' she said.
Carmen smiled. 'I'm going to use the rest room first. I'll be right back. You stay here with Mr Reacher, OK?'
The kid nodded gravely and Mr Reacher sat himself down opposite her and they looked at each other quite openly. He wasn't sure what she was seeing, but he was seeing a living version of the photograph from her mother's wallet. Thick corn-coloured hair tied back in a ponytail, incongruous dark eyes wide open and staring at him rather than at the camera's lens, a little snub of a nose, a serious mouth closed in a rather earnest way. Her skin was impossibly perfect, like pink damp velvet.
'Where did you go to school?' she asked. 'Did you go here too?'
'No, I went to lots of different places,' he said. 'I moved around.'
'You didn't go to the same school all the time?'
He shook his head. 'Every few months, I went to a new one.'
She concentrated hard. Didn't ask why. Just examined the proposition for its benefits and drawbacks.
'How could you remember where everything was? Like the bathrooms? You might forget who the teacher was. You might call her by the wrong name.'
He shook his head again. 'When you're young, you can remember stuff pretty well. It's when you get old that you start to forget things.'
'I forget things,' she said. 'I forgot what my daddy looks like. He's in prison. But I think he's coming home soon.'
'Yes, I think he is.'
'Where did you go to school when you were six and a half like me?'
School, the centre of her universe. He thought about it. When he was six and a half the war in Vietnam was still well below its peak but it was already big enough for his father to be there or thereabouts at the time. So he figured that year would have been split between Guam and Manila. Manila, mostly, he thought, judging by his memories of the buildings and the vegetation, the places he hid out in and played around.
'The Philippines,' he said.
'Is that in Texas too?' she asked.
'No, it's a bunch of islands between the Pacific and the South China Sea. Right out in the ocean, a long way from here.'
'The ocean,' she said, like she wasn't sure. 'Is the ocean in America?'
'Is there a map on the wall in your school?'
'Yes, there is. A map of the whole world.'
'OK, the oceans are all the blue parts.'
'There's a lot of blue parts.'
He nodded. 'That's for sure.'
'My mom went to school in California.'
'That'll be on the map, too. Find Texas and look to the left.'
He saw her looking down at her hands, trying to remember which was left and which was right. Then he saw her look up beyond his shoulder, and he turned to see Carmen on her way back, trapped temporarily by the sales people getting up out of their booth. She waited until they had moved to the door and cleared the aisle and then she skipped back and sat down, all in one graceful movement. She pressed close to Ellie and hugged her one-armed and tickled her and got a squeal in exchange. The waitress finished with the sales people at the register and walked over, pad and pencil at the ready.
'Three Coke floats, please,' Ellie said, loud and clear.
The waitress wrote it down. 'Coming right up, honey,' she said, and walked away.
'Is that OK for you?' Carmen asked.
Reacher nodded. Like the smell of elementary school, he remembered the taste of a Coke float. He'd had his first ever in a PX canteen in Berlin, in a long low Quonset hut left over from the Four Powers occupation. It had been a warm summer's day in Europe, no air conditioning, and he remembered the heat on his skin and the bubbles in his nose.
'It's silly,' Ellie said. 'It's not the _Coke_ that floats. It's the ice cream that floats _in_ the Coke. They should call them ice cream floats.'
Reacher smiled. He recalled thinking the same sorts of things when he was her age. Outraged puzzlement at the illogicalities of the world he was being asked to join.
'Like elementary school,' he said. 'I found out that elementary means easy. So elementary school means easy school. I remember thinking, well, it seems pretty hard to me. Hard school would be a better name.'
Ellie looked at him, seriously. 'I don't think it's hard,' she said. 'But maybe it's harder in the ocean.'
'Or maybe you're smarter than me.'
She thought about it, earnestly. 'I'm smarter than some people,' she said. 'Like Peggy. She's still on the three-letter words. And she thinks you spell zoo with a Z.'
Reacher had no answer to that. He waited for Carmen to pick it up, but before she could the waitress arrived back with a tin tray with three tall glasses on it. She put them on the table with great ceremony and whispered 'Enjoy' to Ellie and backed away. But the glasses were almost a foot tall, and the drinking straws added another six inches, and Ellie's chin was about level with the table top, so her mouth was a long way from where it needed to be.
'You want me to hold it down?' Carmen asked her. 'Or do you want to kneel up?'
Ellie thought about it. Reacher was starting to wonder if this kid ever made a quick, easy decision. He saw a little of himself in her. He had taken things too seriously. The kids in every new school had made fun of him for it. But usually only once.
'I'll kneel up,' she said.
It was more than kneeling. She stood on the vinyl bench in a kind of crouch, with her hands planted palms-down on the table around the base of the glass, and her head ducked to the straw. As good a method as any, Reacher figured. She started sucking her drink and he turned to look at his own. The ice cream was a round greasy spoonful. He found the cola way too sweet, like it was mixed from syrup in the wrong proportions. The bubbles were huge and artificial. It tasted awful. A long way from a childhood summer's day in Germany.
'Don't you like it?' Ellie asked.
Her mouth was full, and she sprayed a little of the mixture onto his sleeve.
'I didn't say anything.'
'You're making a funny face.'
'Too sweet,' he said. 'It'll rot my teeth. Yours, too.'
She came up with a huge grimace, like she was showing her teeth to a dentist. 'Doesn't matter,' she said. 'They're all going to fall out anyway. Peggy's got two out already.'
Then she bent back to her straw and vacuumed up the rest of the drink. She poked at the sludge in the bottom of the glass with her straw until it was liquid enough to suck.
'I'll finish yours, too, if you want,' she said.
'No,' her mother said back. 'You'll throw up in the car.'
'I won't. I promise.'
'No,' Carmen said again. 'Now go to the bathroom, OK? It's a long way home.'
'I went already,' Ellie said. 'We always go at school, last thing. We line up. We have to. The bus driver hates it if we pee on the seats.'
Then she laughed delightedly.
'Ellie,' her mother said.
'Sorry, Mommy. But it's only the boys who do that. I wouldn't do it.'
'Go again anyway, OK?'
Ellie rolled her eyes theatrically and clambered over her mother's lap and ran to the back of the diner. Reacher put a five over the check.
'Great kid,' he said.
'I think so,' Carmen said. 'Well, most of the time.'
'Smart as anything.'
She nodded. 'Smarter than me, that's for sure.'
He let that one go, too. Just sat in silence and watched her eyes cloud over.
'Thanks for the sodas,' she said.
He shrugged. 'My pleasure. And a new experience. I don't think I've ever bought a soda for a kid before.'
'So you don't have any of your own, obviously.'
'Never even got close.'
'No nieces or nephews? No little cousins?'
He shook his head.
'I was a kid myself,' he said. 'Once upon a time, and along time ago. Apart from what I remember about that, I don't know too much about it.'
'Stick around a day or two and Ellie will teach you more than you ever wanted to know. As you've probably guessed.'
Then she looked beyond his shoulder and he heard Ellie's footsteps behind him. The floor was old and there were obviously air pockets trapped under the buckled linoleum because her shoes made hollow slapping sounds.
'Mom, let's _go_ ,' she said.
'Mr Reacher is coming too,' Carmen said. 'He's going to work with the horses.'
He got up out of the booth and saw her watching him.
'OK,' she said. 'But let's _go_.'
They pushed outside into the heat. Past the middle of the afternoon, and it was hotter than ever. The Crown Victoria was gone. They walked around to the Cadillac and Ellie climbed through to the back seat. Carmen sat for a long moment with her hand resting on the key. She closed her eyes. Then she opened them again and started the engine.
She drove back through the crossroads and past the school again and then more than sixty miles straight south. She went pretty slowly. Maybe half the speed she had used before. Ellie didn't complain. Reacher guessed she thought this was normal. He guessed Carmen never drove very fast on her way home.
They didn't pass much. There were power lines looping rhythmically between weathered poles on the left shoulder. There were windmills and oil pumps here and there in the distance, some of them working, most of them seized up and still. There were more V-8 irrigation rigs on the western side of the road, on the edges of old fields, but they were silent and rusted because the winds had scoured the earth shallow. Some places, it was cleaned right back to dry caliche ledges. Nothing much left to irrigate. The eastern side was better. There were whole square miles of mesquite, and sometimes broad patches of decent grassland running in irregular linear shapes, like there must be water underground.
Every ten or twelve miles there would be a ranch gate standing isolated by the side of the road. They were simple right-angle shapes, maybe fifteen feet wide, maybe fifteen feet high, with beaten earth tracks running through them into the distance. Some of them had names on them, made up from strips of wood nailed into the shapes of letters. Some of them had the names formed from iron, worked by hand into fancy script. Some of them had old bleached cattle skulls fixed centrally, with long horns curving outward like vulture's wings. Some of them were supplemented by old barbed wire strands running aimlessly into the middle distance, sketching the location of ancient boundaries. The wire was on wooden posts, and the posts were weathered and twisted into corkscrew shapes and looked as if they would turn to dust if you touched them.
Some of the ranch houses were visible, depending on the contours of the land. Where it was flat, Reacher could see clusters of buildings in the far distance. The houses were two-storey, mostly painted white, crouching among huddles of low barns and sheds. They had windmills out back, and satellite dishes, and they looked quiet and stunned in the heat. The sun was getting low in the west, and the outside temperature was still showing a hundred and ten.
'It's the road, I think,' Carmen said. 'It soaks up the sun all day, and gives it back later.'
Ellie had fallen asleep, sprawled across the rear seat. Her head was pillowed on the briefcase. Her cheek was touching the edges of the papers that outlined how her mother could best escape her father.
'Greer property starts here,' Carmen said. 'On the left. Next track is ours, about eight miles.'
It was flat land, rising slightly on the right to a fragmented mesa about a mile away to the west. On the left, the Greers had better barbed wire than most. It looked like it might have been restrung less than fifty years ago. It ran reasonably straight into the east, enclosing patchy grassland that showed about equal parts green and brown. Miles away there was a forest of oil derricks visible against the skyline, all surrounded by tin huts and abandoned equipment.
'Greer Three,' Carmen said. 'Big field. It made Sloop's grandfather a lot of money, way back. Ran dry about forty years ago. But it's a famous family story, about that gusher coming in. Most exciting thing that ever happened to them.'
She slowed a little more, clearly reluctant to make the final few miles. In the far distance the road rose into the boiling haze and Reacher could see the barbed wire change to an absurd picket fence. It was tight against the shoulder, like something you would see in New England, but it was painted dull red. It ran about half a mile to a ranch gate, which was also painted red, and then ran on again into the distance and out of sight. There were buildings behind the gate, much closer to the road than the ones he had seen before. There was a big old house with a two-storey core and a tall chimney and sprawling one-storey additions. There were low barns and sheds clustered loosely around it. There was ranch fencing enclosing arbitrary squares of territory. Everything was painted dull red, all the buildings and all the fences alike. The low orange sun blazed against them and made them glow and shimmer and split horizontally into bands of mirage.
She slowed still more where the red fence started. Coasted the last hundred yards with her foot off the gas and then turned in on a beaten dirt track running under the gate. There was a name on the gate, high above their heads, red-painted wood on red-painted wood. It said _Red House_. She glanced up at it as she passed through.
'Welcome to hell,' she said.
The red house itself was the main building in a compound of four impressive structures. It had a wide planked porch with wooden columns and a swinging seat hung from chains, and beyond it eighty yards farther on was a motor barn, but she couldn't drive down to it because a police cruiser was parked at an angle on the track, completely blocking her way. It was an old-model Chevy Caprice, painted black and white, with _Echo County Sheriff_ on the door, where it had said something else before. Bought by the county secondhand, Reacher thought, maybe from Dallas or Houston, repainted and refurbished for easy duty out here in the sticks. It was empty and the driver's door was standing open. The light bar on the roof was flashing red and blue, whipping colours horizontally over the porch and the whole front of the house.
'What's this about?' Carmen said.
Then her hand went up to her mouth.
'God, he can't be home already,' she said. 'Please, no.'
'Cops wouldn't bring him home,' Reacher said. 'They don't run a limo service.'
Ellie was waking up behind them. No more hum from the engine, no more rocking from the springs. She struggled upright and gazed out, eyes wide.
'What's that?' she said.
'It's the sheriff,' Carmen said.
'Why's _he_ here?' Ellie asked.
'I don't know.'
'Why are the lights flashing?'
'I don't know.'
'Did somebody call 911? Maybe there's been a burglar. Maybe he wore a mask and stole something.'
She crawled through and knelt on the padded armrest between the front seats. Reacher caught the school smell again and saw delighted curiosity in her face. Then he saw it change to extreme panic.
'Maybe he stole a horse,' she said. 'Maybe my pony, Mommy.'
She scrambled across Carmen's lap and scrabbled at the door handle. Jumped out of the car and ran across the yard, as fast as her legs would carry her, her arms held stiff by her sides and her ponytail bouncing behind her.
'I don't think anybody stole a horse,' Carmen said. 'I think Sloop's come home.'
'With the lights flashing?' Reacher said.
She unclipped her seat belt and swivelled sideways and placed her feet on the dirt of the yard. Stood up and stared toward the house, with her hands on the top of the door frame, like the door was shielding her from something. Reacher did the same on his side. The fierce heat wrapped around him. He could hear bursts of radio chatter coming from the sheriff's car.
'Maybe they're looking for you,' he said. 'You've been away overnight. Maybe they reported you missing.'
Across the Cadillac's roof, she shook her head. 'Ellie was here, and as long as they know where she is they don't care where I am.'
She stood still for a moment longer, and then she took a sideways step and eased the door shut behind her. Reacher did the same. Twenty feet away, the house door opened and a uniformed man stepped out onto the porch. The sheriff, obviously. He was about sixty and overweight, with dark tanned skin and thin grey hair plastered to his head. He was walking half backward, taking his leave of the gloom inside. He had black pants and a white uniform shirt with epaulettes and embroidered patches on the shoulders. A wide gun belt with a wooden-handled revolver secured into a holster with a leather strap. The door closed behind him and he turned toward his cruiser and stopped short when he saw Carmen. Touched his forefinger to his brow in a lazy imitation of a salute.
'Mrs Greer,' he said, like he was suggesting something was her fault.
'What happened?' she asked.
'Folks inside will tell you,' the sheriff said. 'Too damn hot for me to be repeating everything twice.'
Then his gaze skipped the roof of the Cadillac and settled on Reacher.
'And who are you?' he asked.
Reacher said nothing.
'Who are you?' the guy said again.
'I'll tell the folks inside,' Reacher replied. 'Too damn hot for me to be repeating everything twice.'
The guy gave him a long calm look, and finished with a slow nod of his head, like he'd seen it all before. He dumped himself inside his secondhand cruiser and fired it up and backed out to the road. Reacher let its dust settle on his shoes and watched Carmen drive the Cadillac down the track to the motor barn. It was a long low farm shed with no front wall, and it was painted red, like everything else. There were two pick-ups and a Jeep Cherokee in it. One of the pick-ups was recent and the other was sitting on flat tyres and looked like it hadn't been moved in a decade. Beyond the building a narrow dirt track looped off into the infinite desert distance. Carmen eased the Cadillac in next to the Jeep and walked back out into the sun. She looked small and out of place in the yard, like an orchid in a trash pile.
'So where's the bunkhouse?' he asked.
'Stay with me,' she said. 'You need to meet them anyway. You need to get hired. You can't just show up in the bunkhouse.'
'OK,' he said.
She led him slowly to the bottom of the porch steps. She took them cautiously, one at a time. She arrived in front of the door and knocked.
'You have to knock?' Reacher asked.
She nodded. 'They never gave me a key,' she said.
They waited, with Reacher a step behind her, appropriate for the hired help. He could hear footsteps inside. Then the door swung open. A guy was standing there, holding the inside handle. He looked to be in his middle twenties. He had a big square face, with the skin blotched red and white. He was bulky with frat-boy muscle turning to fat. He was wearing denim jeans and a dirty white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled tight over what was left of his biceps. He smelled of sweat and beer. He was wearing a red baseball cap backward on his head. A semi-circle of forehead showed above the plastic strap. At the back, a shock of hair spilled out under the peak, exactly the same colour and texture as Ellie's.
'It's you,' he said, glancing at Carmen, glancing away.
'Bobby,' she said.
Then his glance settled on Reacher.
'Who's your friend?'
'His name is Reacher. He's looking for work.'
The guy paused. 'Well, come on in, I guess,' he said. 'Both of you. And close the door. It's hot.'
He turned back into the gloom and Reacher saw the letter T on the ball cap. _Texas Rangers_ , he thought. _Good ball club, but not good enough_. Carmen followed the guy three steps behind, entering her home of nearly seven years like an invited guest. Reacher stayed close to her shoulder.
'Sloop's brother,' she whispered to him.
He nodded. The hallway was dark inside. He could see the red paint continued everywhere, over the wooden walls, the floors, the ceilings. Most places it was worn thin or worn away completely, just leaving traces of pigment behind like a stain. There was an ancient air conditioner running somewhere in the house, forcing the temperature down maybe a couple of degrees. It ran slowly, with a patient drone and rattle. It sounded peaceful, like the slow tick of a clock. The hallway was the size of a motel suite, filled with expensive stuff, but it was all old, like they'd run out of money decades ago. Or else they'd always had so much that the thrill of spending it had worn off a generation ago. There was a huge mirror on one wall, with the ornate frame painted red. Opposite it was a rack filled with six bolt-action hunting rifles. The mirror reflected the rack and made the hallway seem full of guns.
'What did the sheriff want?' Carmen called.
'Come inside,' Bobby called back.
_We are inside_ , Reacher thought. But then he saw he meant _come into the parlour_. It was a big red room at the back of the house. It had been remodelled. It must have been a kitchen once. It opened out through the original wall of the house to a replacement kitchen easily fifty years old. The parlour had the same worn paint everywhere, including all over the furniture. There was a big farmhouse table and eight wheel back chairs, all made out of pine, all painted red, all worn back to shiny wood where human contact had been made.
One of the chairs was occupied by a woman. She looked to be somewhere in her middle fifties. She was the sort of person who still dresses the same way she always did despite her advancing age. She was wearing tight jeans with a belt and a blouse with a Western fringe. She had a young woman's hairstyle, coloured a bright shade of orange and teased up off her scalp above a thin face. She looked like a twenty-year-old prematurely aged by some rare medical condition. Or by a shock. Maybe the sheriff had sat her down and given her some awkward news. She looked preoccupied and a little confused. But she showed a measure of vitality, too. A measure of authority. There was still vigour there. She looked like the part of Texas she owned, rangy and powerful, but temporarily laid low, with most of her good days behind her.
'What did the sheriff want?' Carmen asked again.
'Something happened,' the woman said, and her tone meant it wasn't something good. Reacher saw a flicker of hope behind Carmen's eyes. Then the room went quiet and the woman turned to look in his direction.
'His name is Reacher,' Carmen said. 'He's looking for work.'
'Where's he from?'
Her voice was like rawhide. _I'm the boss here_ , it said.
'I found him on the road,' Carmen answered.
'What can he do?'
'He's worked with horses before. He can do blacksmithing.'
Reacher looked out of the window while she lied about his skills. He had never been closer to a horse than walking past the ceremonial stables on the older Army bases that still had them. He knew in principle that a blacksmith made horseshoes, which were iron things horses had nailed to their feet. Or their hoofs. _Hooves?_ He knew there was a charcoal brazier involved, and a bellows, and a great deal of rhythmic hammering. An anvil was required, and a trough of water. But he had never actually touched a horseshoe. He had seen them occasionally, nailed up over doors as a superstition. He knew some cultures nailed them upward, and some downward, all to achieve the same good luck. But that was all he knew about them.
'We'll talk about him later,' the woman said. 'Other things to talk about first.'
Then she remembered her manners and sketched a wave across the table. 'I'm Rusty Greer,' she said.
'Like the ballplayer?' Reacher asked.
'I was Rusty Greer before he was born,' the woman said. Then she pointed at Bobby. 'You already met my boy Robert Greer. Welcome to the Red House Ranch, Mr Reacher. Maybe we can find you work. If you're willing and honest.'
'What did the sheriff want?' Carmen asked for the third time.
Rusty Greer turned and looked straight at her. 'Sloop's lawyer's gone missing,' she said.
'What?'
'He was on his way to the federal jail to see Sloop. He never got there. State Police found his car abandoned on the road, south of Abilene. Just sitting there empty, miles from anywhere, keys still in it. Situation doesn't look good.'
'Al Eugene?'
'How many lawyers you think Sloop had?'
Her tone added: _you idiot_. The room went totally silent and Carmen went pale and her hand jumped to her mouth, fingers rigid and extended, covering her lips.
'Maybe the car broke down,' she said.
'Cops tried it,' Rusty said. 'It worked just fine.'
'So where is he?'
'He's gone missing. I just told you that.'
'Have they looked for him?'
'Of course they have. But they can't find him.'
Carmen took a deep breath. Then another. 'Does it change anything?' she asked.
'You mean, is Sloop still coming home?'
Carmen nodded weakly, like she was terribly afraid of the answer.
'Don't you worry none,' Rusty said. She was smiling. 'Sloop will be back here Monday, just like he always was going to be. Al going missing doesn't change a thing. The sheriff made that clear. It was a done deal.'
Carmen paused a long moment, with her eyes closed, and her hand on her lips. Then she forced the hand down and forced the lips into a trembling smile.
'Well, good,' she said.
'Yes, good,' her mother-in-law said.
Carmen nodded, vaguely. Reacher thought she was about to faint.
'What do you suppose happened to him?' she asked.
'How would I know? Some sort of trouble, I expect.'
'But who would make trouble for Al?'
Rusty's smile thinned to a sneer. 'Well, take your best guess, dear,' she said.
Carmen opened her eyes. 'What does that mean?'
'It means, who would want to make trouble for their lawyer?'
'I don't know.'
'Well, I do,' Rusty said. 'Somebody who buys them a big old Mercedes Benz and gets sent to jail anyhow, that's who.'
'Well, who did that?'
'Anybody could have. Al Eugene takes anybody for a client. He has no _standards_. He's halfway to being plain crooked. Maybe all the way crooked, for all I know. Three-quarters of his clients are the wrong sort.'
Carmen was still pale. 'The wrong sort?'
'You know what I mean.'
'You mean Mexican? Why don't you just come right out and say it?'
Rusty was still smiling. 'Well, tell me different,' she said. 'Some Mexican boy gets sent to jail, he doesn't just stand up and accept his punishment like we do. No, he blames his lawyer, and he gets all his brothers and his cousins all riled up about it, and of course he's got plenty of those come up here after him, all illegals, all _cholos_ , all of them in gangs, and now you see exactly how that turns out. Just like it is down there in Mexico itself. You of all people should know what it's like.'
'Why should I of all people? I've never even been to Mexico.'
Nobody replied to that. Reacher watched her, standing up shaken and proud and alone like a prisoner in the enemy camp. The room was quiet. Just the thump and click of the old air conditioner running somewhere else.
'You got an opinion here, Mr Reacher?' Rusty Greer asked.
It felt like a left-field question in a job interview. He wished he could think of something smart to say. Some diversion. But it wouldn't help any to start some big clumsy fight and get himself thrown off the property inside the first ten minutes.
'I'm just here to work, ma'am,' he said.
'I'd like to know your opinion, all the same.'
Just like a job interview. A character reference. Clearly she wanted exactly the right sort of person shovelling horseshit for her.
'Mr Reacher was a cop himself,' Carmen said. 'In the Army.'
Rusty nodded. 'So what's your thinking, ex-Army cop?'
Reacher shrugged. 'Maybe there's an innocent explanation. Maybe he had a nervous breakdown and wandered off.'
'Doesn't sound very likely. Now I see why they made you an ex-cop.'
Silence for a long moment.
'Well, if there was trouble, maybe white folks made it,' Reacher said.
'That's not going to be a popular view around here, son.'
'It's not looking to be popular. It's looking to be right or wrong. And the population of Texas is three-quarters white, therefore I figure there's a three-in-four chance white folks were involved, assuming people are all the same as each other.'
'That's a big assumption.'
'Not in my experience.'
Rusty bounced her gaze off the table top, back to Carmen.
'Well, no doubt you agree,' she said. 'With your new friend here.'
Carmen took a breath. 'I never claim to be better than anyone else,' she said. 'So I don't see why I should agree I'm worse.'
The room stayed quiet.
'Well, time will tell, I guess,' Rusty said. 'One or other of us is going to be eating humble pie.'
She said it _paah_. The long syllable trailed into silence.
'Now, where's Sloop's little girl?' she asked, with an artificial brightness in her voice, like the conversation had never happened. 'You bring her back from school?'
Carmen swallowed and turned to face her. 'She's in the barn, I think. She saw the sheriff and got worried her pony had been stolen.'
'That's ridiculous. Who would steal her damn pony?'
'She's only a child,' Carmen said.
'Well, the maid is ready to give the child its supper, so take it to the kitchen, and show Mr Reacher to the bunkhouse on your way.'
Carmen just nodded, like a servant with new instructions. Reacher followed her out of the parlour, back to the hallway. They went outside into the heat again and paused in the shadows on the porch.
'Ellie eats in the kitchen?' Reacher asked.
Carmen nodded. 'Rusty hates her,' she said.
'Why? She's her granddaughter.'
Carmen looked away. 'Her blood is tainted,' she said. 'Don't ask me to explain it. It's not rational. She hates her, is all I know.'
'So why all the fuss if you took her away?'
'Because Sloop wants her here. She's his weapon against me. His instrument of torture. And his mother does what he wants.'
'She make you eat in the kitchen, too?'
'No, she makes me eat with her,' she said. 'Because she knows I'd rather not.'
He paused, at the edge of the shadow.
'You should have gotten out of here,' he said. 'We should be in Vegas by now.'
'I was hopeful, for a second,' she said. 'About Al Eugene. I thought there might be a delay.'
He nodded. 'So was I. It would have been useful.'
She nodded, tears in her eyes. 'I know,' she said. 'Too good to be true.'
'So you should still think about running.'
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Shook her head. 'I won't run,' she said. 'I won't be a fugitive.'
He said nothing.
'And you should have agreed with her,' she said. 'About the Mexicans. I'd have understood you were bluffing. I need her to keep you around.'
'I couldn't.'
'It was a risk.'
She led him down the steps into the sun and across the yard. Beyond the motor barn was a horse barn. That structure was red like everything else, big as an aircraft hangar, with clerestory vents in the roof. There was a big door standing a foot open. There was a strong smell coming out of it.
'I'm not much of a country guy,' he said.
'You'll get used to it,' she said.
Behind the barn were four corrals boxed in with red fences. Two of them were covered in scrubby grass, and two of them had desert sand piled a foot thick. There were striped poles resting on oil drums to make jumping courses. Behind the corrals was another red building, long and low, with small windows high up under the eaves.
'The bunkhouse,' she said.
She stood still for a moment, lost in thought. Then she shivered in the heat and came back, all business.
'The door is round the other side,' she said. 'You'll find two guys in there, Joshua and Billy. Don't trust either one of them. They've been here for ever and they belong to the Greers. The maid will bring your meals down to you in about an hour, after Ellie eats, before we do.'
'OK,' he said.
'And Bobby will come down to check you out, sooner or later. Watch him carefully, Reacher, because he's a snake.'
'OK,' he said again.
'I'll see you later,' she said.
'You going to be all right?'
She nodded once and walked away. He watched her until she was behind the horse barn, and then he walked around and found the door into the bunkhouse.
FIVE
The boy filled a whole new page in his notebook. The men with the telescopes called out descriptions and the exact sequence of events. The arrival of the sheriff, the return of the beaner and the kid with the new guy in tow, the kid running off to the barn, the sheriff leaving, the beaner and the new guy entering the house, a long period of nothing doing, the emergence of the beaner and the new guy onto the porch, their walk together down toward the bunkhouse, her return alone.
'Who is he?' the boy asked.
'Hell should we know?' one of the men replied.
_Very tall, heavy, not neatly dressed, shirt and pants, can't tell how old_ , the boy wrote. Then he added: _Not a wrangler, wrong shoes. Trouble?_
The grade fell away behind the bunkhouse and made it a two-storey building. The lower floor had huge sliding doors, frozen open on broken tracks. There was another pick-up in there, and a couple of green tractors. At the far end to the right was a wooden staircase without a handrail leading upward through a rectangular hole in the ceiling. Reacher spent a minute on the ground floor looking at the vehicles. The pick-up had a gun rack in the rear window. The air was hot and heavy and smelled of gasoline and motor oil.
Then he used the staircase and came out on the second level. All the interior carpentry was painted red, walls, floor and roof beams alike. The air was hotter still up there, and stale. No air conditioning, and not much ventilation. There was a closed-off area at the far end, which he guessed was the bathroom. Apart from that the whole of the floor was one big open space, with sixteen beds facing each other eight to a side, with simple iron frames and thin striped mattresses and bedside cabinets and footlockers.
The two beds nearest the bathroom were occupied. Each had a small, wiry man lying half dressed on top of the sheets. Both men wore blue jeans and fancy tooled boots and no shirts. Both had their hands folded behind their heads. They both turned toward the staircase as Reacher stepped up inside the room. They both unlaced their nearer arms to get a better look at him.
Reacher had done four years at West Point, and then thirteen years in the service, so he had a total seventeen years' experience of walking into a new dormitory and being stared at by its occupants. It wasn't a sensation that bothered him. There was a technique involved in handling it. An etiquette. The way to do it was to just walk in, select an unoccupied bed, and say absolutely nothing at all. Make somebody else speak first. That way, you could judge their disposition before you were forced to reveal your own.
He walked to a bed two places away from the head of the staircase, against the north wall, which he judged would be cooler than the south. In the past, in the Army, he would have had a heavy canvas kit bag to dump on the bed as a symbol of possession. The kit bag would be stencilled with his name and his rank, and the number of re-stencillings on it would offer a rough guide to his biography. Kit bags saved a lot of talking time. But the best he could do in this new situation was take his folding toothbrush from his pocket and prop it on the bedside cabinet. As a substitute gesture, it lacked physical impact. But it made the same point. It said _I live here now, same as you do_. _You got any kind of a comment to make about that?_
Both men kept on staring at him, saying nothing. Lying down, it was hard to judge their physiques with any degree of certainty, but they were both small. Maybe five-six or -seven each, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. But they were wiry and muscular, like middleweight boxers. They had farmers' tans, deep brown on their arms and their faces and their necks, and milky white where T-shirts had covered their bodies. They had random knobs and old swellings here and there on their ribs and arms and collar bones. Reacher had seen marks like that before. Carmen had one. He had one or two himself. They were where old fractures had set and healed.
He walked past the two men to the bathroom. It had a door, but it was a communal facility inside, four of everything with no interior partitioning. Four toilets, four sinks, four shower heads in a single elongated stall. It was reasonably clean, and it smelled of warm water and cheap soap, like the two guys had recently showered, maybe ready for Friday evening off. There was a high window with a clogged insect screen and no glass. By standing tall he could see past the corner of the horse barn all the way up to the house. He could see half of the porch and a sliver of the front door.
He came back into the dormitory room. One of the guys had hauled himself upright and was sitting with his head turned, watching the bathroom door. His back was as pale as his front, and it had more healed fractures showing through the skin. The ribs, the right scapula. Either this guy spent a lot of time getting run over by trucks, or else he was a retired rodeo rider who had passed his career a little ways from the top of his trade.
'Storm coming,' the guy said.
'What I heard,' Reacher said.
'Inevitable, with a temperature like this.'
Reacher said nothing.
'You hired on?' the guy asked.
'I guess,' Reacher said.
'So you'll be working for us.'
Reacher said nothing.
'I'm Billy,' the guy said.
The other guy moved up on his elbows. 'Josh,' he said.
Reacher nodded to them both. 'I'm Reacher,' he said. 'Pleased to meet you.'
'You'll do the scut work for us,' the guy called Billy said. 'Shovelling shit and toting bales.'
'Whatever.'
'Because you sure don't look like much of a horse rider to me.'
'I don't?'
Billy shook his head. 'Too tall. Too heavy. Centre of gravity way up there. No, my guess is you're not much of a horse rider at all.'
'The Mexican woman bring you in?' Josh asked.
'Mrs Greer,' Reacher said.
'Mrs Greer is Rusty,' Billy said. 'She didn't bring you in.'
'Mrs Carmen Greer,' Reacher said.
Billy said nothing. The guy called Josh just smiled.
'We're heading out after supper,' Billy said. 'Bar, couple hours south of here. You could join us. Call it a get-to-know-you type of thing.'
Reacher shook his head. 'Maybe some other time, when I've earned something. I like to pay my own way, situation like that.'
Billy thought about it and nodded.
'That's a righteous attitude,' he said. 'Maybe you'll fit right in.'
The guy called Josh just smiled.
Reacher walked back to his bed and stretched himself out, keeping still, fighting the heat. He stared up at the red-painted rafters for a minute, and then he closed his eyes.
The maid brought supper forty minutes later. She was a middle-aged white woman who could have been a relative of Billy's. She greeted him with familiarity. Maybe a cousin. Certainly she looked a little like him. Sounded like him. The same genes in there somewhere. She greeted Josh with ease and Reacher himself with coolness. Supper was a pail of pork and beans, which she served into metal bowls with a ladle taken from her apron pocket. She handed out forks and spoons, and empty metal cups.
'Water in the bathroom faucet,' she said, for Reacher's benefit.
Then she went back down the stairs and Reacher turned his attention to the food. It was the first he had seen all day. He sat on his bed with the bowl on his knees and ate with the spoon. The beans were dark and soupy and mixed with a generous spoonful of molasses. The pork was tender and the fat was crisp. It must have been fried separately and mixed with the beans afterwards.
'Hey, Reacher,' Billy called over. 'So what do you think?'
'Good enough for me,' he said.
'Bullshit,' Josh said. 'More than a hundred degrees all day, and she brings us hot food? I showered already and now I'm sweating like a pig again.'
'It's free,' Billy said.
'Bullshit, it's free,' Josh said back. 'It's a part of our wages.'
Reacher ignored them. Bitching about the food was a staple of dormitory life. And this food wasn't bad. Better than some he'd eaten. Better than what came out of most barracks cookhouses. He dumped his empty bowl on the cabinet next to his toothbrush and lay back down and felt his stomach go to work on the sugars and the fats. Across the room Billy and Josh finished up and wiped their mouths with their forearms and took clean shirts out of their footlockers. Shrugged them on and buttoned them on the run and combed through their hair with their fingertips.
'See you later,' Billy called.
They clattered down the stairs and a moment later Reacher heard the sound of a gasoline engine starting up directly below. The pick-up, he guessed. He heard it back out through the doors and drive away. He stepped into the bathroom and saw it come round the corner and wind around the horse barn and bounce across the yard past the house.
He walked back through the dormitory and piled the three used bowls on top of each other, with the silverware in the topmost. Threaded the three mug handles onto his forefinger and walked down the stairs and outside. The sun was nearly below the horizon but the heat hadn't backed off at all. The air was impossibly hot. Almost suffocating. And it was getting humid. A warm damp breeze was coming in from somewhere. He walked up past the corrals, past the barn, through the yard. He skirted around the porch and looked for the kitchen door. Found it and knocked. The maid opened up.
'I brought these back,' he said.
He held up the bowls and the mugs.
'Well, that's kind of you,' she said. 'But I'd have come for them.'
'Long walk,' he said. 'Hot night.'
She nodded. 'I appreciate it,' she said. 'You had enough?'
'Plenty,' he said. 'It was very good.'
She shrugged, a little bashful. 'Just cowboy food.'
She took the used dishes from him and carried them inside.
'Thanks again,' she called.
It sounded like a dismissal. So he turned away and walked out to the road, with the low sun full on his face. He stopped under the wooden arch. Ahead of him to the west was nothing at all, just the empty eroded mesa he had seen on the way in. On the right, to the north, was a road sixty miles long with a few buildings at the end of it. A neighbour fifteen miles away. On the left, to the south, he had no idea. A bar two hours away, Billy had said. Could be a hundred miles. He turned round. To the east, Greer land for a stretch, and then somebody else's, and then somebody else's again, he guessed. Dry holes and dusty caliche and nothing much more all the way back to Austin, four hundred miles away.
_New guy comes to gate and stares right at us_ , the boy wrote. _Then looks all around_. _Knows we're here? Trouble?_
He closed his book again and pressed himself tighter to the ground.
'Reacher,' a voice called.
Reacher squinted right and saw Bobby Greer in the shadows on the porch. He was sitting in the swing seat. Same denims, same dirty T-shirt. Same backward ball cap.
'Come here,' he called.
Reacher paused a beat. Then he walked back past the kitchen and stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.
'I want a horse,' Bobby said. 'The big mare. Saddle her up and bring her out.'
Reacher paused again. 'You want that now?'
'When do you think? I want an evening ride.'
Reacher said nothing.
'And we need a demonstration,' Bobby said.
'Of what?'
'You want to hire on, you need to show us you know what you're doing.'
Reacher paused again, longer.
'OK,' he said.
'Five minutes,' Bobby said.
He stood up and headed back inside the house. Closed the door. Reacher stood for a moment with the heat on his back and then headed down to the barn. Headed for the big door. The one with the bad smell coming out of it. A demonstration? _You're in deep shit now_ , he thought. _More ways than one._
There was a light switch inside the door, in a metal box screwed to the siding. He flicked it on and weak yellow bulbs lit the enormous space. The floor was beaten earth, and there was dirty straw everywhere. The centre of the barn was divided into horse stalls, back to back, with a perimeter track lined with floor-to-ceiling hay bales inside the outer walls. He circled around the stalls. A total of five were occupied. Five horses. They were all tethered to the walls of their stalls with complicated rope constructions that fitted neatly over their heads.
He took a closer look at each of them. One of them was very small. A pony. Ellie's, presumably. _OK, strike that_. Four to go. Two were slightly bigger than the other two. He bent down low and peered upward at them, one at a time. In principle he knew what a mare should look like, underneath. It should be easy enough to spot one. But in practice, it wasn't easy. The stalls were dark and the tails obscured the details. In the end he decided the first one he looked at wasn't a mare. Wasn't a stallion, either. Some parts were missing. _A gelding. Try the next_. He shuffled along and looked at the next. _OK, that's a mare. Good_. The next one was a mare, too. The last one, another gelding.
He stepped back to where he could see both of the mares at once. They were huge shiny brown animals, huffing through their noses, moving slightly, making dull _clop_ sounds with their feet on the straw. _No, their hoofs. Hooves?_ Their necks were turned, so they could watch him with one eye each. Which one was bigger? The one on the left, he decided. A little taller, a little heavier, a little wider in the shoulders. _OK, that's the big mare. So far, so good_.
_Now, the saddle_. Each stall had a kind of a thick post coming horizontally out of the outside wall, right next to the gate, with a whole bunch of equipment piled on it. A saddle for sure, but also a lot of complicated straps and blankets and metal items. The straps are the reins, he guessed. The metal thing must be the bit. It goes in the horse's mouth. _The bit between her teeth, right?_ He lifted the saddle off the post. It was very heavy. He carried it balanced on his left forearm. _Felt good_. Just like a regular cowboy. _Roy Rogers, eat your heart out_.
He stood in front of the stall gate. The big mare watched him with one eye. Her lips folded back like thick rolls of rubber, showing big square teeth underneath. They were yellow. _OK, think. First principles_. Teeth like that, this thing is not a carnivore. It's not a biting animal. Well, it might try to nick you a little, but it's not a lion or a tiger. It eats grass. It's a herbivore. Herbivores are generally timid. Like antelope or wildebeest out there on the sweeping plains of Africa. So this thing's defence mechanism is to run away, not to attack. It gets scared, and it runs. But it's a pack animal, too. So it's looking for a leader. It will submit to a show of authority. _So be firm, but don't scare it_.
He opened the gate. The horse moved. Its ears went back and its head went up. Then down. Up and down, against the rope. It moved its back feet and swung its huge rear end toward him.
'Hey,' he said, loud and clear and firm.
It kept on coming. He touched it on the side. It kept on coming. _Don't get behind it_. _Don't let it kick you_. That much, he knew. What was the phrase? _Like being kicked by a horse?_ Had to mean something.
'Stand still,' he said.
It was swinging sideways toward him. He met its flank with his right shoulder. Gave it a good solid shove, like he was aiming to bust down a door. The horse quieted. Stood still, huffing gently. He smiled. _I'm the boss, OK?_ He put the back of his right hand up near its nose. It was something he had seen at the movies. _You rub the back of your hand on its nose, and it gets to know you_. _Some smell thing_. The skin on its nose felt soft and dry. Its breath was strong and hot. Its lips peeled back again and its tongue came out. It was huge and wet.
'OK, good girl,' he whispered.
He lifted the saddle two-handed and dumped it down on her back. Pushed and pulled at it until it felt solid. It wasn't easy. _Was it the right way round?_ Had to be. It was shaped a little like a chair. There was a definite front and a back. There were broad straps hanging down on either side. Two long, two short. Two had buckles, two had holes. What were _they_ for? To hold the saddle on, presumably. You bring the far ones around and buckle them at the side, up underneath where the rider's thigh would be. He ducked down and tried to grab the far straps, underneath the horse's belly. He could barely reach them. This was one wide animal, that was for damn sure. He stretched and caught the end of one strap in his fingertips and the saddle slipped sideways.
'Shit,' he breathed.
He straightened up and levelled the saddle again. Ducked down and grabbed for the far straps. The horse moved and put them way out of his reach.
' _Shit_ ,' he said again.
He stepped closer, crowding the horse against the wall. It didn't like that, and it leaned on him. He weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. The horse weighed half a ton. He staggered backward. The saddle slipped. The horse stopped moving. He straightened the saddle again and kept his right hand on it while he groped for the straps with his left.
'Not like _that_ ,' a voice called from way above him.
He spun round and looked up. Ellie was lying on top of the stack of hay bales, up near the roof, her chin on her hands, looking down at him.
'You need the _blanket_ first,' she said.
'What blanket?'
'The saddle cloth,' she said.
The horse moved again, crowding hard against him. He shoved it back. Its head came around and it looked at him. He looked back at it. It had huge dark eyes. Long eyelashes. He glared at it. _I'm not afraid of you, pal. Stand still or I'll shove you again_.
'Ellie, does anybody know you're in here?' he called.
She shook her head, solemnly. 'I'm hiding,' she said. 'I'm good at hiding.'
'But does anybody know you hide in here?'
'I think my mommy knows I do sometimes, but the Greers don't.'
'You know how to do this horse stuff?'
'Of course I do. I can do my pony all by myself.'
'So help me out here, will you? Come and do this one for me.'
'It's easy,' she said.
'Just show me, OK?'
She stayed still for a second, making her usual lengthy decision, and then she scrambled down the pile of bales and jumped to the ground and joined him in the stall.
'Take the saddle off again,' she said.
She took a cloth off the equipment post and shook it out and threw it up over the mare's back. She was too short and Reacher had to straighten it one-handed.
'Now put the saddle on it,' she said.
He dropped the saddle on top of it. Ellie ducked underneath the horse's belly and caught the straps. She barely needed to stoop. She threaded the ends together and pulled.
'You do it,' she said. 'They're stiff.'
He lined the buckles up and pulled hard.
'Not too tight,' Ellie said. 'Not yet. Wait for her to swell up.'
'She's going to _swell up_?'
Ellie nodded, gravely. 'They don't like it. They swell their stomachs up to try to stop you. But they can't hold it, so they come down again.'
He watched the horse's stomach. It was already the size of an oil drum. Then it blew out, bigger and bigger, fighting the straps. Then it subsided again. There was a long sigh of air through its nose. It shuffled around and gave up.
'Now do them tight,' Ellie said.
He pulled them as tight as he could. The mare shuffled in place. Ellie had the reins in her hands, shaking them into some kind of coherent shape.
'Take the rope off of her,' she said. 'Just pull it down.'
He pulled the rope down. The mare's ears folded forward and it slid down over them, over her nose, and off.
'Now hold this up.' She handed him a tangle of straps. 'It's called the bridle.'
He turned it in his hands, until the shape made sense. He held it against the horse's head until it was in the right position. He tapped the metal part against the mare's lips. _The bit_. She kept her mouth firmly closed. He tried again. No result.
'How, Ellie?' he asked.
'Put your thumb in.'
'My thumb? Where?'
'Where her teeth stop. At the side. There's a hole.'
He traced the ball of his thumb sideways along the length of the mare's lips. He could feel the teeth passing underneath, one by one, like he was counting them. Then they stopped, and there was just gum.
'Poke it in,' Ellie said.
'My _thumb_?'
She nodded. He pushed, and the lips parted, and his thumb slipped into a warm, gluey, greasy socket. And sure enough, the mare opened her mouth.
'Quick, put the bit in,' Ellie said.
He pushed the metal into the mouth. The mare used her massive tongue to get it comfortable, like she was helping him, too.
'Now pull the bridle up and buckle it.'
He eased the leather straps up over the ears and found the buckles. There were three of them. One fastened flat against the slab of cheekbone. One went over her nose. The third was hanging down under her neck.
'Not too tight,' Ellie said. 'She's got to breathe.'
He saw a worn mark on the strap, which he guessed indicated the usual length.
'Now loop the reins up over the horn.'
There was a long strap coming off the ends of the bit in a loop. He guessed that was the rein. And he guessed the horn was the upright thing at the front end of the saddle. Like a handle, for holding on with. Ellie was busy pulling the stirrups down into place, walking right under the mare's belly from one side to the other.
'Now lift me up,' she said. 'I need to check everything.'
He held her under the arms and lifted her into the saddle. She felt tiny and weighed nothing at all. The horse was way too wide for her, and her legs came out more or less straight on each side. She lay down forward and stretched her arms out and checked all the buckles. Re-did some of them. Tucked the loose ends away. Pulled the mane hair out neatly from under the straps. Gripped the saddle between her legs and jerked herself from side to side, checking for loose movement.
'It's OK,' she said. 'You did very good.'
She put her arms out to him and he lifted her down. She was hot and damp.
'Now just lead her out,' she said. 'Hold her at the side of her mouth. If she won't come, give her a yank.'
'Thanks a million, kid,' he said. 'Now go hide again, OK?'
She scrambled back up the stack of hay bales and he tugged at a strap coming off a metal ring at the side of the mouth. The mare didn't move. He clicked his tongue and pulled again. The mare lurched forward. He jumped ahead and she got herself into some kind of a rhythm behind him. _Clop, clop, clop_. He led her out of the stall and pulled her round the corner and headed for the door. Let her come ahead to his shoulder and stepped with her into the yard. She walked easily. He adjusted to her pace. His arm was neatly bent at the elbow and her head was rocking up and down a little and her shoulder was brushing gently against his. He walked her across the yard like he'd done it every day of his life. _Roy Rogers, eat your damn heart out_.
Bobby Greer was back on the porch steps, waiting. The mare walked right up to him and stopped. Reacher held the little leather strap while Bobby checked all of the same things Ellie had. He nodded.
'Not bad,' he said.
Reacher said nothing.
'But you took longer than I expected.'
Reacher shrugged. 'I'm new to them. I always find it's better to go slow, the first time. Until they're familiar with me.'
Bobby nodded again. 'You surprise me. I would have bet the farm the nearest you'd ever gotten to a horse was watching the Preakness on cable.'
'The what?'
'The Preakness. It's a horse race.'
'I know it is. I was kidding.'
'So maybe it's a double surprise,' Bobby said. 'Maybe my sister-in-law was actually telling the truth for once.'
Reacher glanced at him. 'Why wouldn't she be?'
'I don't know why. But she hardly ever does. You need to bear that in mind.'
Reacher said nothing. Just waited.
'You can go now,' Bobby said. 'I'll put her away when I'm through.'
Reacher nodded and walked away. He heard a crunch of leather behind him, which he assumed was Bobby getting up into the saddle. But he didn't look back. He just walked through the yard, down past the barn, past the corrals, and round the corner of the bunkhouse to the foot of the stairway. He intended to go straight up and take a long shower to get rid of the terrible animal smell that was clinging to him. But when he got up to the second storey, he found Carmen sitting on his bed with a set of folded sheets on her knees. She was still in her cotton dress, and the sheets glowed white against the skin of her bare legs.
'I got you these,' she said. 'From the linen closet in the bathroom. You're going to need them. I didn't know if you would realize where they were.'
He stopped at the head of the stairs, one foot inside the room, the other foot still on the last tread.
'Carmen, this is crazy,' he said. 'You should get out, right now. They're going to realize I'm a phoney. I'm not going to last a day. I might not even be here on Monday.'
'I've been thinking,' she said. 'All the way through supper.'
'About what?'
'About Al Eugene. Suppose it's about whoever Sloop is going to rat out? Suppose they woke up and took some action? Suppose they grabbed Al to stop the deal?'
'Can't be. Why would they wait? They'd have done it a month ago.'
'Yes, but suppose everybody _thought_ it was.'
He stepped all the way into the room.
'I don't follow,' he said, although he did.
'Suppose you made Sloop disappear,' she said. 'The exact same way somebody made Al disappear. They'd think it was all connected somehow. They wouldn't suspect you. You'd be totally in the clear.'
He shook his head. 'We've been through this. I'm not an assassin.'
She went quiet. Looked down at the sheets in her lap and began picking at a seam. The sheets were frayed and old. Cast-offs from the big house, Reacher thought. Maybe Rusty and her dead husband had slept between those same sheets. Maybe Bobby had. Maybe Sloop had. Maybe Sloop and Carmen, together.
'You should just get out, right now,' he said again.
'I can't.'
'You should stay somewhere inside of Texas, just temporarily. Fight it, legally. You'd get custody, in the circumstances.'
'I don't have any money. It could cost a hundred thousand dollars.'
'Carmen, you have to do _something_.'
She nodded. 'I know what I'm going to do,' she said. 'I'm going to take a beating, Monday night. Then Tuesday morning, I'm going to come find you, wherever you are. Then you'll _see_ , and maybe you'll change your mind.'
He said nothing. She angled her face up into the fading light from the high windows. Her hair tumbled back on her shoulders.
'Take a good look,' she said. 'Come close.'
He stepped nearer.
'I'll be all bruised,' she said. 'Maybe my nose will be broken. Maybe my lips will be split. Maybe I'll have teeth missing.'
He said nothing.
'Touch my skin,' she said. 'Feel it.'
He put the back of his forefinger on her cheek. Her skin was soft and smooth, like warm silk. He traced the wide arch of her cheekbone.
'Remember this,' she said. 'Compare it to what you feel Tuesday morning. Maybe it'll change your mind.'
He took his finger away. Maybe it _would_ change his mind. That was what she was counting on, and that was what he was afraid of. The difference between cold blood and hot blood. It was a big difference. For him, a crucial difference.
'Hold me,' she said. 'I can't remember how it feels to be held.'
He sat down next to her and took her in his arms. She slid hers around his waist and buried her head in his chest.
'I'm scared,' she said.
They sat like that for twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. Reacher lost all track of time. She was warm and fragrant, breathing steadily. Then she pulled away and stood up, with a bleak expression on her face.
'I have to go find Ellie,' she said. 'It's her bedtime.'
'She's in the barn. She showed me how to put all that crap on the horse.'
She nodded. 'She's a good kid.'
'That's for sure,' he said. 'Saved my bacon.'
She handed the sheets to him.
'You want to come riding tomorrow?' she asked.
'I don't know how.'
'I'll teach you.'
'Could be a long process.'
'It can't be. We have to get up on the mesa.'
'Why?'
She looked away. 'Something you have to teach _me_ ,' she said. 'In case Tuesday doesn't change your mind. I need to know how to work my gun properly.'
He said nothing.
'You can't deny me the right to defend myself,' she said.
He said nothing. She went quietly down the stairs, leaving him sitting on the bed holding the folded sheets on his knees, exactly like he had found her.
He made up his bed. The old sheets were thin and worn, which he figured was OK, in the circumstances. The temperature was still somewhere in the high nineties. Middle of the night, it might cool off to eighty-five. He wasn't going to be looking for a lot of warmth.
He went back down the stairs and stepped outside. Looking east, there was a black horizon. He stepped round the bunkhouse corner and faced the sunset in the west. It flamed against the red buildings. He stood still and watched it happen. This far south, the sun would drop away pretty quickly. Like a giant red ball. It flared briefly against the rim of the mesa and then disappeared and the sky lit up red above it.
He heard the sound of footsteps in the dust ahead of him. Squinted into the sunset glare and saw Ellie walking down toward him. Little short steps, stiff arms, the blue halter dress specked with pieces of straw. Her hair was lit from behind and glowed red and gold like an angel.
'I came to say goodnight,' she said.
He remembered times in the past, being entertained in family quarters on a base somewhere, the melancholy notes of taps sounding faintly in the distance, polite Army kids saying a formal farewell to their fathers' brother officers. He remembered it well. You shook their little hands, and off they went. He smiled at her.
'OK, goodnight, Ellie,' he said.
'I like you,' she said.
'Well, I like you, too,' he said.
'Are you hot?'
'Very.'
'There'll be a storm soon.'
'Everybody tells me that.'
'I'm glad you're my mommy's friend.'
He said nothing. Just put out his hand. She looked at it.
'You're supposed to give me a goodnight kiss,' she said.
'Am I?'
'Of _course_ you are.'
'OK,' he said.
Her face was about level with his thigh. He started to bend down.
'No, pick me up,' she said.
She held up her arms, more or less vertical. He paused a beat and then swung her in the air and settled her in the crook of his elbow. Kissed her cheek, gently.
'Goodnight,' he said again.
'Carry me,' she said. 'I'm tired.'
He carried her past the corrals, past the horse barn, across the yard to the house. Carmen was waiting on the porch, leaning on a column, watching them approach.
'There you are,' she said.
'Mommy, I want Mr Reacher to come in and say goodnight,' Ellie said.
'Well, I don't know if he can.'
'I only work here,' Reacher said. 'I don't live here.'
'Nobody will _know_ ,' Ellie said. 'Come in through the kitchen. There's only the maid in there. She works here, too. And she's allowed in the house.'
Carmen stood there, unsure.
'Mommy, _please_ ,' Ellie said.
'Maybe if we all go in together,' Carmen said.
'Through the kitchen,' Ellie said. Then she changed her voice to a fierce whisper that was probably louder than talking. 'We don't want the _Greers_ to see us.'
Then she giggled, and rocked in Reacher's arms, and ducked her face down into his neck. Carmen glanced at him, a question in her face. He shrugged back. _What's the worst thing can happen?_ He lowered Ellie to the ground and she took her mother's hand. They walked together to the kitchen door and Carmen pushed it open.
_Sunset_ , the boy wrote, and noted the time. The two men crawled backward from the lip of the gulch and raised themselves up on their knees and stretched. _Off duty_ , the boy wrote, and noted the time. Then they all three scrabbled around on their knees and pulled the rocks off the corners of the tarp hiding their pick-up. Folded it as neatly as they could without standing up and stowed it in the load bed. Repacked the cooler and collapsed the telescopes and climbed three-in-a-row into the cab. Drove out of the far side of the gulch and headed due west across the hardpan toward the red horizon.
Inside the kitchen the maid was loading a huge dishwashing machine. It was made of green enamel and had probably been the very latest thing around the time man first walked on the moon. She looked up and said nothing. Just kept on stacking plates. Reacher saw the three bowls he had brought her. They were rinsed and ready.
'This way,' Ellie whispered.
She led them through a door that led to a back hallway. There was no window, and the air was suffocating. There were plain wooden stairs on one side, painted red, worn back to the wood in crescent shapes on each tread. She led them upward. The stairs creaked under Reacher's weight.
They finished inside a kind of closet on the second floor. Ellie pushed the door open and crossed a hallway and made a right into a narrow corridor. Everything was wooden, the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Everything was painted red. Ellie's room was at the end of the corridor. It was maybe twelve feet square, and red. And very hot. It faced south and must have been baking in the sun all afternoon. The drapes were closed, and had been all day, Reacher guessed, offering some meagre protection from the heat.
'We'll go get washed up,' Carmen said. 'Mr Reacher will wait here, OK?'
Ellie watched until she was sure he was staying. He sat down on the end of the bed to confirm it. To help her reach her conclusion. She turned slowly and followed her mother out to the bathroom.
The bed was narrow, maybe thirty inches wide. And short, appropriate for a kid. It had cotton sheets printed with small coloured animals of uncertain genus. There was a night table, and a bookcase, and a small armoire. This furniture looked reasonably new. It was made of blond wood, first bleached and then hand-painted with cheerful designs. It looked nice. Probably bought in a cute little boutique and hauled over from Austin, he thought. Or maybe all the way from Santa Fe. Some of the bookshelves held books, and the others held stuffed animals all jumbled together and crammed into the spaces.
He could hear the old air conditioner running. It thumped and rattled, patiently. It was louder here. Must be mounted in the attic, he thought. It made a soothing sound. But it didn't do much about cooling the house. Up there in the trapped air of the second floor, it felt like a hundred and twenty degrees.
Ellie and Carmen came back into the room. Ellie was suddenly quiet and bashful, maybe because she was in her pyjamas. They looked like regular cotton shorts and a T-shirt, but they were printed with little things that might have been rabbits. Her hair was damp and her skin was pink. The back of one hand was wedged in her mouth. She climbed onto the bed and curled up near the pillow, using about half the available length of the mattress, close to him but careful not to touch him.
'OK, goodnight, kid,' he said. 'Sleep well.'
'Kiss me,' she said.
He paused a second, and then he bent down and kissed her forehead. It was warm and damp and smelled of soap. She curled up more and snuggled down into the pillow.
'Thank you for being our friend,' she said.
He stood up and stepped toward the door. Glanced at Carmen. _Did you tell her to say that? Or is it for real?_
'Can you find your way back down?' Carmen asked him.
He nodded.
'I'll see you tomorrow,' she said.
She stayed in Ellie's bedroom and he found the closet with the back stairs in it. He went down to the inside hallway and through the kitchen. The maid was gone. The old dishwasher was humming away to itself. He stepped out into the night and paused in the darkness and silence of the yard. It was hotter than ever. He stepped toward the gate. Ahead of him the sunset had gone. The horizon was black. There was pressure in the air. A hundred miles away to the southwest he could see heat lightning flickering. Faint sheets and bolts of dry electricity discharging randomly, like a gigantic celestial camera taking pictures. He looked straight up. No rain. No clouds. He turned around and caught gleams of white in the darkness off to his right. A T-shirt. A face. A semicircle of forehead showing through the back of a ball cap. Bobby Greer, again.
'Bobby,' he said. 'Enjoy your ride?'
Bobby ignored the enquiry. 'I was waiting for you.'
'Why?'
'Just making sure you came back out again.'
'Why wouldn't I?'
'You tell me. Why would you go in there at all? In the first place? All three of you, like a little family.'
'You saw us?'
Bobby nodded. 'I see everything.'
'Everything?' Reacher repeated.
'Everything I need to.'
Reacher shrugged. 'I kissed the kid goodnight,' he said. 'You got a problem with that?'
Bobby was quiet for a beat.
'Let me walk you back to the bunkhouse,' he said. 'I need to talk to you.'
He didn't talk any on the way down through the yard. He just walked. Reacher kept pace and looked ahead at the night sky in the east. It was vast and black and filled with stars. Apart from dim windows in some of the Greer buildings there was absolute pitch darkness everywhere. It threw the stars into vivid relief, impossibly tiny and numerous points of light dusting backward through billions of cubic miles of space. Reacher liked peering out into the universe. He liked thinking about it. He used it for perspective. He was just a tiny insignificant speck briefly sparked to life in the middle of nowhere. So what really mattered? Maybe nothing at all. So maybe he should just go ahead and bust Sloop Greer's head and have done with it. _Why not?_ In the context of the whole universe, how was that so very different from not busting it at all?
'My brother had a problem,' Bobby said, awkwardly. 'I guess you know that.'
'I heard he cheated on his taxes,' Reacher said.
Bobby nodded in the dark. 'IRS snoops are everywhere.'
'Is that how they found him? Snooping?'
'Well, how else would they?' Bobby asked.
He went quiet. Walked ahead a couple of paces.
'Anyway, Sloop went to jail,' he said.
Reacher nodded. 'Getting out Monday, I heard.'
'That's right. So he's not going to be too happy finding you here, kissing his kid, getting friendly with his wife.'
Reacher shrugged as he walked. 'I'm just here to work.'
'Right, as a wrangler. Not as a nursemaid.'
'I get time off, right?'
'But you need to be careful how you spend it.'
Reacher smiled. 'You mean I need to know my place?'
'Right,' Bobby said. 'And your place ain't alongside my brother's wife, or getting cosy with his kid.'
'A man can't choose his friends?'
'Sloop ain't going to be happy, he gets home and finds some outsider has chosen his wife and kid for his friends.'
Reacher stopped walking. Stood still in the dark. 'Thing is, Bobby, why would I give a rat's ass what makes your brother happy?'
Bobby stopped, too. 'Because we're a family. Things get talked about. You need to get that through your head. Or you won't work here too long. You could get run right out of here.'
'You think?'
'Yeah, I think.'
Reacher smiled again. 'Who you going to call? The sheriff with the secondhand car? Guy like that could get a heart attack, just thinking about it.'
Bobby shook his head. 'West Texas, we look after things personally. It's a tradition. Never had too big of a law enforcement thing around here, so we kind of accustomed ourselves.'
Reacher took a step closer. 'So you going to do it?' he said. 'You want to do it now?'
Bobby said nothing. Reacher nodded.
'Maybe you'd prefer to set the maid on me,' he said. 'Maybe she'll come after me with a skillet.'
'Josh and Billy will do what they're told.'
'The little guys? The maid might be better. Or you, even.'
'Josh and Billy get in the ring with bulls that weigh a ton and a half. They ain't going to be too worried about you.'
Reacher started walking again. 'Whatever, Bobby. I only said goodnight to the kid. No reason to start World War Three over it. She's starved for company. So is her mother. What can I do about it?'
'You can get smart about it, is what,' Bobby said. 'I told you before, she lies about everything. So whatever big story she's been telling you, chances are it's bullshit. So don't go making a fool out of yourself, falling for it. You wouldn't be the first.'
They turned the corner beyond the corrals and headed for the bunkhouse door.
'What does that mean?' Reacher asked.
'How dumb do you think I am? She's gone all day every day for the best part of a month, gone all night as often as she can get away with it, leaving the kid here for us to tend to. And she's gone where? Some motel up in Pecos, is where, screwing the brains out of whatever new guy she can get to believe her bullshit stories about how her husband doesn't understand her. Which is entirely her business, but it's _my_ business if she thinks she can go ahead and bring the guy back here. Two days before her husband gets home? Passing you off as some stranger looking for ranch work? What kind of crap is that?'
'What did you mean, I wouldn't be the first?'
'Exactly what I said. Talk to Josh and Billy about it. They ran him off.'
Reacher said nothing. Bobby smiled at him.
'Don't believe her,' he said. 'There are things she doesn't tell you, and what she does tell you is mostly lies.'
'Why doesn't she have a key to the door?'
'She had a key to the damn door. She lost it, is all. It's never locked, anyway. Why the hell would it be locked? We're sixty miles from the nearest crossroads.'
'So why does she have to knock?'
'She doesn't have to knock. She could walk right in. But she puts on a big thing about how we exclude her. But it's all bullshit. Like, how do we exclude her? Sloop _married_ her, didn't he?'
Reacher said nothing.
'So you work if you want to,' Bobby said. 'But stay away from her and the kid. And I'm saying that for your sake, OK?'
'Can I ask you something?' Reacher said.
'What?'
'Did you know your hat is on backward?'
'My what?'
'Your cap,' Reacher said. 'It's on backward. I wondered if you knew that. Or if maybe it just kind of slipped round, accidentally.'
Bobby stared at him. 'I like it this way,' he said.
Reacher nodded again. 'Well, I guess it keeps the sun off of your neck,' he said. 'Keeps it from getting any redder.'
'You watch your mouth,' Bobby said. 'You stay away from my brother's family, and watch your damn mouth.'
Then he turned in the dark and headed back up to the house. Reacher stood and watched him walk away. Beyond him the lightning still danced on the far southwest horizon. Then he disappeared behind the barn and Reacher listened to the sound his boots made in the dust, until it faded away to nothing.
SIX
Reacher went right to bed, even though it was still early. _Sleep when you can, so you won't need to when you can't_. That was his rule. He had never worked regular hours. To him, there was no real difference between a Tuesday and a Sunday, or a Monday and a Friday, or night and day. He was happy to sleep twelve hours, and then work the next thirty-six. And if he didn't have to work the next thirty-six, then he'd sleep twelve hours again, and again, as often as he could, until something else cropped up.
The bed was short and the mattress was lumpy. The air in the room had settled like a thick hot soup on the thin sheet covering him. He could hear insects outside, clicking and whining loudly. There might have been a billion of them, separately audible if he concentrated hard enough, merging together into a single scream if he didn't. The sound of the night, far from anywhere. There were lonely guttural cries from cougars and coyotes way off in the distance. The horses heard them too, and he sensed restless movement over in the barn, quieting after a moment, starting up again after the next ghostly plaintive yelp. He heard rustling air and imagined he felt changes in pressure as colonies of bats took flight. He imagined he could feel the beat of their leathery wings. He fell asleep watching the stars through a small window high above him.
The road from Pecos to El Paso is more than two hundred miles long, and is dotted on both sides with occasional clumps of motels and gas stations and fast food outlets. The killing crew drove an hour west, which took them seventy miles, and then stopped at the second place they saw. That was the woman's habit. Not the first place. Always the second place. And always arrive very late. It was close to a superstition, but she rationalized it as good security.
The second place had a gas station big enough for eighteen-wheelers to use and a two-storey motel and a twenty-four-hour diner. The tall fair man went into the motel office and paid cash for two rooms. They weren't adjoining. One was on the first floor far from the office and the second was upstairs, halfway down the row. The woman took the upstairs room.
'Get some sleep,' she told her partners. 'We've still got work to do.'
Reacher heard Josh and Billy come back at two in the morning. The air was still hot. The insects were still loud. He heard the pick-up engine a couple of miles south, growing nearer and louder, slowing, turning in at the gate. He heard the squeal of springs as it bounced across the yard. He heard it drive into the shed beneath him, and he heard the motor switch off. Then there was just tinkling and clicking as it cooled, and footsteps on the stairs. They were loud and clumsy. He stayed as deeply asleep as he could and tracked their sounds past him, over to the bathroom, back to their bunks. Their bedsprings creaked as they threw themselves down. Then there was nothing but the insects and the wet rhythmic breathing of men who had worked hard all day and drunk hard all night. It was a sound he was familiar with. He had spent seventeen years in dormitories, off and on.
The insect noise was completely gone when he woke. So were the stars. The high window showed luminous streaks of dawn in their place. Maybe six in the morning, he thought, summer, this far south. It was already hot. He lifted his arm and checked his watch. Ten past six, Saturday morning. He thought about Jodie, in London. It was ten past twelve in London. Six hours ahead. She would have been up for ages. Probably at a museum, looking at pictures. Maybe thinking about lunch, in some English tea-room. Then he thought about Carmen Greer, over in the main house, forty-eight hours away from waking up on the day Sloop came home. And then Ellie, maybe hot and restless on her tiny cot, innocently barrelling on toward the day her little life would change again.
He threw back the crumpled sheet and walked naked to the bathroom, carrying his clothes balled in his hand. Josh and Billy were still deep asleep. They were both still dressed. Josh still had his boots on. They were snoring half-heartedly, sprawled out and inert. There was a vague smell of old beer in the air. The smell of hangovers.
He set the shower going warm until he had soaped the sweat off his body and then turned it to cold to wake himself up. The cold water was nearly as warm as the hot. He imagined it pumping out of the baked ground, picking up heat all the way. He filled a sink with water and soaked his clothes. It was a trick he'd picked up as a kid, long ago, somewhere out in the Pacific, from sentries on the midday watch. If you dress in wet clothes, you've got a built-in air conditioner that keeps you cool until they dry out. An evaporative principle, like a swamp cooler. He dressed with the clammy cotton snagging against his skin and headed down the stairs and outside into the dawn. The sun was over the horizon ahead of him. The sky was arching purple overhead. No trace of cloud. The dust under his feet was still hot from yesterday.
The watchers assembled piecemeal, like they had five times before. It was a familiar routine by then. One of the men drove the pick-up to the boy's place and found him outside and waiting. Then they drove together to the second man's place, where they found that the routine had changed.
'He just called me,' the second man explained. 'Some different plan. We got to go to some place up on the Coyanosa Draw for new instructions, face to face.'
'Face to face with who?' the first man said. 'Not him, right?'
'No, some new people we're going to be working with.'
The boy said nothing. The first man just shrugged.
'OK with me,' he said.
'Plus, we're going to get paid,' the second man said.
'Even better,' the first man said.
The second man squeezed onto the bench seat and closed his door and the pick-up turned and headed north.
Reacher walked round the corner of the bunkhouse and past the corrals to the barn. He could hear no sound at all. The whole place felt stunned by the heat. He was suddenly curious about the horses. Did they lie down to sleep? He ducked in the big door and found the answer was no, they didn't. They were sleeping standing up, heads bowed, knees locked against their weight. The big old mare he'd tussled with the night before smelled him and opened an eye. Looked at him blankly and moved a front foot listlessly and closed her eye again.
He glanced around the barn, rehearsing the work he might be expected to perform. The horses would need feeding, presumably. So there must be a food store someplace. What did they eat? Hay, he guessed. There were bales of it all over the place. Or was that straw, for the floor? He found a separate corner room stacked with sacks of some kind of food supplement. Big waxed-paper bags, from some specialist feed supplier up in San Angelo. So probably the horses got mostly hay, with some of the supplement to make up the vitamins. They'd need water, too. There was a faucet in one corner, with a long hose attached to it. A trough in each stall.
He came out of the barn and walked up the track to the house. Peered in through the kitchen window. Nobody in there. No activity. It looked the same as it had when he left the night before. He walked on toward the road. Heard the front door open behind him and turned to see Bobby Greer stepping out on the porch. He was wearing the same T-shirt and the same ball cap, but now it was the right way around. The peak was low over his eyes. He was carrying a rifle in his right hand. One of the pieces from the rack in the hallway. A fine .22 bolt-action, modern and in good condition. He put it up on his shoulder and stopped short.
'I was on my way to get you up,' he said. 'I need a driver.'
'Why?' Reacher asked. 'Where are you going?'
'Hunting,' Bobby said. 'In the pick-up.'
'You can't drive?'
'Of course I can drive. But it takes two. You drive while I shoot.'
'You shoot from a truck?'
'I'll show you,' Bobby said.
He walked across to the motor barn. Stopped next to the newer pick-up. It had a roll bar built into the load bed.
'You drive,' he said. 'Out on the range. I'm here in back, leaning on the bar. Gives me a three-hundred-sixty-degree field of fire.'
'While we're moving?'
'That's the skill of it. It's fun. Sloop invented it. He was real good.'
'What are you hunting?'
'Armadillo,' Bobby said. He stepped sideways and pointed down the track into the desert. It was a narrow dirt road scuffed into the landscape, meandering left and right to avoid rock formations, taking the path of least resistance.
'Hunting country,' he said. 'It's pretty good, south of here. And they're all out there, good fat ones. Dillo chili, can't beat it for lunch.'
Reacher said nothing.
'You never ate armadillo?' Bobby asked.
Reacher shook his head.
'Good eating,' Bobby said. 'Back when my granddaddy was a boy, depression times, it was about all the eating there was. Texas turkey, they called it. Or Hoover hog. Kept people alive. Now the tree-huggers have got it protected. But if it's on our land, it's ours to shoot. That's the way I see it.'
'I don't think so,' Reacher said. 'I don't like hunting.'
'Why not? It's a challenge.'
'For you, maybe,' Reacher said. 'I already know I'm smarter than an armadillo.'
'You work here, Reacher. You'll do what you're told.'
'We need to discuss some formalities, before I work here.'
'Like what?'
'Like wages.'
'Two hundred a week,' Bobby said. 'Bed and three squares a day thrown in.'
Reacher said nothing.
'OK?' Bobby asked. 'You wanted work, right? Or is it just Carmen you want?'
Reacher shrugged. _Two hundred a week?_ It was a long time since he'd worked for two hundred a week. But then, he wasn't there for the money.
'OK,' he said.
'And you'll do whatever Josh and Billy tell you to.'
'OK,' Reacher said again. 'But I won't take you hunting. Not now, not ever. Call it a matter of conscience.'
Bobby was quiet for a long moment. 'I'll find ways to keep you away from her, you know. Every day, I'll find something.'
'I'll be in the barn,' Reacher said, and walked away.
Ellie brought his breakfast to him there. She was wearing a miniature set of blue denim dungarees. Her hair was wet and loose. She was carrying a plate of scrambled eggs. She had silverware in her breast pocket, upright, like pens. She was concentrating on remembering a message.
'My mommy says, don't forget the riding lesson,' she recited. 'She wants you to meet her here in the barn after lunch.'
Then she ran back toward the house without another word. He sat down on a bale and ate the eggs. Took the empty plate back to the kitchen and headed down to the bunkhouse. Josh and Billy weren't there to tell him to do anything. _Suits me_ , he thought. He didn't go looking for them. Just lay down and dozed in the heat.
The Coyanosa Draw was a watercourse with a bed wide enough to carry the runoff from the Davis Mountains to the Pecos River, which took it to the Rio Grande all the way down on the border with Mexico. But runoff was seasonal and unreliable, so the region was sparsely populated. There were abandoned farmsteads built close to the dry riverbed, far from each other, far from anywhere. One of them had an old swaybacked house baked grey by the sun. In front of it was an empty barn. The barn had no doors, just an open wall facing west toward the house. The way the buildings were set in the landscape, the interior of the barn was invisible except from the yard right in front of it.
The Crown Victoria was waiting inside the barn, its engine idling to keep the air going. The barn had an exterior staircase leading up to a hayloft, with a small platform outside the door at the top. The woman was out in the heat, up on the platform, from where she could survey the meandering approach road. She saw the watchers' pick-up two miles away. It was travelling fast and kicking up a plume of dust. She waited until she was sure it was unaccompanied and then she turned and walked down the stairs. Signalled to the others.
They got out of the car and stood waiting in the heat. They heard the pick-up on the road, and then it pulled round the corner of the barn and slowed in the yard. They directed it with hand signals, like traffic cops. They pointed into the barn. One of them led the truck on foot, gesturing like the guy on the airport apron. He brought it tight up to the rear wall, gesturing all the time, and then he gave a thumbs-up to halt it. He stepped alongside the driver's window and his partner stepped to the passenger door.
The driver shut off the motor and relaxed. Human nature. The end of a fast drive to a secret rendezvous, the intrigue of new instructions, the prospect of a big payday. He wound down his window. On the passenger's side, the second man did the same thing. Then they both died, shot in the side of the head with nine-millimetre bullets. The boy in the middle lived exactly one second longer, both sides of his face splattered with blood and brain tissue, his notebook clutched in his hands. Then the small dark man leaned in and shot him twice in the chest. The woman pushed him out of the way and adjusted the window winders on both doors to leave the glass cracked open about an inch. An inch would let insects in and keep scavengers out. Insects would help with decomposition, but scavengers could drag body parts away, which would risk visibility.
Reacher dozed a couple of hours before Josh and Billy got back. They didn't give him any instructions. They just got cleaned up for lunch. They told him they were invited inside the house to eat. And he wasn't, because he had refused to drive.
'Bobby told me you ran some guy off,' he said.
Joshua just smiled.
'What guy?' Billy said.
'Some guy came down here with Carmen.'
'The Mexican?'
'Some friend of hers.'
Billy shook his head. 'Don't know anything about it. We never ran any guy off. What are we, cops?'
'You're the cop,' Joshua said.
'Am I?'
Joshua nodded. 'Bobby said so. You were a military cop.'
'You been discussing me?'
Joshua shrugged and went quiet.
'Got to go,' Billy said.
Twenty minutes later Carmen herself brought his armadillo lunch to him. It was in a covered dish, which smelled strongly of chili. She left, nervous and in a hurry, without saying a word. He tried the meal. The meat was halfway between sweet and ordinary. It had been shredded and chopped and mixed with beans and two-alarm sauce from a bottle. Then slightly overdone in a warm oven. He had eaten worse, and he was hungry, which helped. He took his time, and then carried the dish back to the kitchen. Bobby was standing out on the porch steps, like a sentry.
'Horses need more feed supplement,' he called. 'You'll go with Josh and Billy to pick it up. After siesta. Get as many bags as fit in the truck.'
Reacher nodded and walked on to the kitchen. Gave the used dish to the maid, and thanked her for the meal. Then he walked down to the barn and went inside and sat on a bale of straw to wait. The horses turned round in their stalls to watch him do it. They were patient and listless in the heat. One of them was chewing slowly. There were hay stalks stuck to its lips.
Carmen came in ten minutes later. She had changed into faded blue jeans and a checked cotton shirt with no sleeves. She was carrying a straw hat and her pocketbook. She looked tiny and afraid.
'Bobby doesn't know you called the IRS,' he said. 'He thinks it was random snooping. So maybe Sloop does, too.'
She shook her head. 'Sloop knows.'
'How?'
She shrugged. 'Actually, he doesn't _know_. But he convinced himself it had to be me. He was looking for somebody to blame, and who else is there? No evidence or anything, but as it happens he's right. Ironic, isn't it?'
'But he didn't tell Bobby.'
'He wouldn't. He's too stubborn to agree with them. They hate me, he hates me, he keeps it a secret, they keep it a secret. From him, I mean. They make sure I know it.'
'You should get out. You've got forty-eight hours.'
She nodded. 'Forty-eight hours exactly, think. They'll let him out at seven in the morning. They'll drive all night to be there for him. It's about seven hours. So he'll be back home this time on Monday. Just after lunch.'
'So get out, right now.'
'I can't.'
'You should,' he said. 'This place is impossible. It's like the outside world doesn't exist.'
She smiled, bitterly. 'Tell me about it. I've lived here nearly seven years. My whole adult life, give or take.'
She hung her hat and her pocketbook on a nail in the wall. Did all the saddling work herself, quickly and efficiently. She was lithe and deft. The slim muscles in her arms bunched and relaxed as she lifted the saddles. Her fingers were precise with the buckles. She readied two horses in a quarter of the time he had taken to do one.
'You're pretty good at this,' he said.
' _Gracias, señor_ ,' she said. 'I get a lot of practice.'
'So how can they believe you keep falling off, regular as clockwork?'
'They think I'm clumsy.'
He watched her lead his horse out of its stall. It was one of the geldings. She was tiny beside it. In the jeans, he could have spanned her waist with his hand.
'You sure don't look clumsy,' he said.
She shrugged. 'People believe what they need to.'
He took the rein from her. The horse huffed through its nose and shifted its feet. Moved its head up and down, up and down. His hand went with it.
'Walk him out,' she said.
'Shouldn't we have leather pants? And riding gloves?'
'Are you kidding? We never wear that stuff here. It's way too hot.'
He waited for her. Her horse was the smaller mare. She wedged her hat on her head and took her pocketbook off the nail and put it in a saddlebag. Then she followed him, leading her mare confidently out into the yard, into the heat and the sun.
'OK, like this,' she said. She stood on the mare's left and put her left foot in the stirrup. Gripped the horn with her left hand and bounced twice on her right leg and jacked herself smoothly into the saddle. He tried it the same way. Put his left foot in the stirrup, grasped the horn, put all his weight on the stirrup foot and straightened his leg and pulled with his hand. Leaned his weight forward and right and suddenly he was up there in the seat. The horse felt very wide, and he was very high in the air. About the same as riding on an armoured personnel carrier.
'Put your right foot in,' she said.
He jammed his foot into the other stirrup and squirmed around until he was as comfortable as he was ever going to get. The horse waited patiently.
'Now bunch the reins on the horn, in your left hand.'
That part was easy. It was just a question of imitating the movies. He let his right hand swing free, like he was carrying a Winchester repeater or a coil of rope.
'OK, now just relax. And kick gently with your heels.'
He kicked once and the horse lurched into a walk. He used his left hand on the horn to keep himself steady. After a couple of paces he began to understand the rhythm. The horse was moving him left and right and forward and back with every alternate step. He held tight to the horn and used pressure from his feet to keep his body still.
'Good,' she said. 'Now I'll go in front and he'll follow. He's pretty docile.'
_I would be, too_ , he thought, _a hundred ten degrees and two hundred fifty pounds on my back_. Carmen clicked her tongue and kicked her heels and her horse moved smoothly around his and led the way through the yard and past the house. She swayed easily in the saddle, the muscles in her thighs bunching and flexing as she kept her balance. Her hat was down over her eyes. Her left hand held the rein and her right was hanging loose at her side. He caught the blue flash of the fake diamond in the sun.
She led him out under the gate to the road and straight across without looking or stopping. He glanced left and right, south and north, and saw nothing at all except heat shimmer and distant silver mirages. On the far side of the road was a step about a foot high onto the limestone ledge. He leaned forward and let the horse climb it underneath him. Then the rock rose gently into the middle distance, reaching maybe fifty feet of elevation in the best part of a mile. There were deep fissures running east–west and washed-out holes the size of shell craters. The horses picked their way between them. They seemed pretty sure on their feet. So far, he hadn't had to do any conscious steering. Which he was happy about, because he wasn't exactly sure how to.
'Watch for rattlesnakes,' Carmen called.
'Great,' he called back.
'Horses get scared by anything that moves. They'll spook and run. If that happens, just hang on tight and haul on the reins.'
'Great,' he said again.
There were scrub by plants rooting desperately in cracks in the rock. There were smaller holes, two or three feet across, some of them with undercut sides. _Just right for a snake_ , he thought. He watched them carefully at first. Then he gave it up, because the shadows were too harsh to see anything. And the saddle was starting to wear on him.
'How far are we going?' he called.
She turned, like she had been waiting for the question.
'We need to get over the rise,' she said. 'Down into the gulches.'
The limestone smoothed out into broader unbroken shelves and she slowed to let his horse move up alongside hers. But it stayed just short of level, which kept him behind her. Kept him from seeing her face.
'Bobby told me you had a key,' he said.
'Did he?'
'He said you lost it.'
'No, that's not true. They never gave me one.'
He said nothing.
'They made a big point of not giving me one,' she said. 'Like it was a symbol.'
'So he was lying?'
She nodded, away from him. 'I told you, don't believe anything he says.'
'He said the door's never locked, anyway.'
'Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.'
'He told me you don't have to knock, either.'
'That's a lie, too,' she said. 'Since Sloop's been gone, if I don't knock, they run and grab a rifle. Then they go _oh sorry, but strangers prowling around the house make us nervous_. Like a big pretend show.'
He said nothing.
'Bobby's a liar, Reacher,' she said. 'I told you that.'
'I guess he is. Because he also told me you brought some other guy down here, and he got Josh and Billy to run him off. But Josh and Billy didn't know anything about any guy.'
She was quiet for a long moment.
'No, that was true,' she said. 'I met a man up in Pecos, about a year ago. We had an affair. At first just at his place up there. But he wanted more.'
'So you brought him here?'
'It was his idea. He thought he could get work, and be close to me. I thought it was crazy, but I went along with it. That's where I got the idea to ask you to come. Because it actually worked for a spell. Two or three weeks. Then Bobby caught us.'
'And what happened?'
'That was the end of it. My friend left.'
'So why would Josh and Billy deny it to me?'
'Maybe it wasn't Josh and Billy who ran him off. Maybe they didn't know about it. Maybe Bobby did it himself. My friend wasn't as big as you. He was a schoolteacher, out of work.'
'And he just disappeared?'
'I saw him again, just once, back in Pecos. He was scared. Wouldn't talk to me.'
'Did Bobby tell Sloop?'
'He promised he wouldn't. We had a deal.'
'What kind of a deal?'
She went quiet again. Just rode on, sitting slackly on the swaying horse.
'The usual kind,' she said. 'If I'd do something for him, he'd keep quiet.'
'What kind of something?'
She paused again. 'Something I really don't want to tell you about,' she said.
'I see.'
'Yes, you see.'
'And did he keep quiet?'
'I really have no idea. He made me do it twice. It was disgusting. _He's_ disgusting. But he promised faithfully. But he's a liar, so I'm assuming he told Sloop anyway. On one of his brotherly visits. I always knew it was a lose-lose gamble, but what could I do? What choice did I have?'
'Bobby figures that's why I'm here. He thinks we're having an affair, too.'
She nodded. 'That would be my guess. He doesn't know Sloop hits me. Even if he did, he wouldn't expect me to do anything about it.'
Reacher was quiet for a spell. Another twenty yards, thirty, at the slow patient pace of a walking horse.
'You need to get out,' he said. 'How many times do you have to hear it?'
'I won't run,' she answered.
They reached the top of the rise and she made a small sound and her horse stopped walking. His stopped, too, at her shoulder. They were about fifty feet above the plain. Ahead of them, to the west, the caliche sloped gently down again, pocked by dry gulches the size of ballparks. Behind them, to the east, the red house and the other buildings in the compound were spread out a mile away, flat on the baked land like a model. The road ran like a grey ribbon, north and south. Behind the tiny motor barn the dirt track wandered south and east through the desert, like a scar on burned and pockmarked skin. The air was dry and unnaturally clear all the way to both horizons, where it broke up into haze. The heat was a nightmare. The sun was fearsome. Reacher could feel his face burning.
'Take care as we go down,' Carmen said. 'Stay balanced.'
She moved off ahead of him, letting her horse find its own way down the incline. He kicked with his heels and followed her. He lost the rhythm as his horse stepped short and he started bouncing uncomfortably.
'Follow me,' she called.
She was moving to the right, toward a dry gulch with a flat floor, all stone and sand. He started trying to figure which rein he should pull on, but his horse turned anyway. Its feet crunched on gravel and slipped occasionally. Then it stepped right down into the gulch, which jerked him violently backward and forward. Ahead of him Carmen was slipping out of the saddle. Then she was standing on the ground, stretching, waiting for him. His horse stopped next to hers and he shook his right foot free of the stirrup and got off by doing the exact opposite of what had got him on a half-hour before.
'So what do you think?' she asked.
'Well, I know why John Wayne walked funny.'
She smiled briefly and led both horses together to the rim of the gulch and heaved a large stone over the free ends of both sets of reins. He could hear absolute silence, nothing at all behind the buzz and shimmer of the heat. She lifted the flap of her saddlebag and took out her pocketbook. Zipped it open and slipped her hand in and came out with a small chromium handgun.
'You promised you'd teach me,' she said.
'Wait,' he said.
'What?'
He said nothing. Stepped left, stepped right, crouched down, stood tall. Stared at the floor of the gulch, moving around, using the shadows from the sun to help him.
'What?' she said again.
'Somebody's been here,' he said. 'There are tracks. Three people, a vehicle driving in from the west.'
'Tracks?' she said. 'Where?'
He pointed. 'Tyre marks. Some kind of a truck. Stopped here. Three people, crawled up to the edge on their knees.'
He put himself where the tracks ended at the rim of the gulch. Lay down on the hot grit and hauled himself forward on his elbows. Raised his head.
'Somebody was watching the house,' he said.
'How do you know?'
'Nothing else to see from here.'
She knelt alongside him, the chromium pistol in her hand.
'It's too far away,' she said.
'Must have used field glasses. Telescopes, even.'
'Are you sure?'
'You ever see reflections? The sun on glass? In the mornings, when the sun was in the east?'
She shuddered. 'No,' she said. 'Never.'
'Tracks are fresh,' he said. 'Not more than a day or two old.'
She shuddered again. 'Sloop,' she said. 'He thinks I'm going to take Ellie. Now I know he's getting out. He's having me watched.'
Reacher stood up and walked back to the centre of the bowl.
'Look at the tyre tracks,' he said. 'They were here four or five times.'
He pointed down. There were several overlapping sets of tracks in a complex network. At least four, maybe five. The tyre treads were clearly pressed into the powdered sand. There was a lot of detail. The outside shoulder of the front right tyre was nearly bald.
'But they're not here today,' Carmen said. 'Why not?'
'I don't know,' Reacher said.
Carmen looked away. Held out the gun to him.
'Please show me how to use this,' she said.
He moved his gaze from the tracks in the sand and looked at the gun. It was a Lorcin L-22 automatic, two-and-a-half-inch barrel, chrome frame, with plastic moulded grips made to look like pink mother-of-pearl. Made in Mira Loma, California, not too long ago, and probably never used since it left the factory.
'Is it a good one?' she asked.
'How much did you pay for it?'
'Over eighty dollars.'
'Where?'
'In a gun store up in Pecos.'
'Is it legal?'
She nodded. 'I did all the proper paperwork. Is it any good?'
'I guess,' he said. 'As good as you'll get for eighty bucks, anyway.'
'The man in the store said it was ideal.'
'For what?'
'For a lady. I didn't tell him why I needed it.'
He hefted it in his hand. It was tiny, but reasonably solid. Not light, not heavy. Not heavy enough to be loaded, anyway.
'Where are the bullets?' he asked.
She stepped back toward the horses. Took a small box out of her bag. Came back and handed it to him. It was neatly packed with tiny .22 shells. Maybe fifty of them.
'Show me how to load it,' she said.
He shook his head. 'You should leave it out here,' he said. 'Just dump it and forget about it.'
'But why?'
'Because this whole thing is crazy. Guns are dangerous, Carmen. You shouldn't keep one around Ellie. There might be an accident.'
'I'll be very careful. And the house is full of guns anyway.'
'Rifles are different. She's too small to reach the trigger and have it pointing at herself simultaneously.'
'I keep it hidden. She hasn't found it yet.'
'Only a matter of time.'
She shook her head. 'My decision,' she said. 'She's my daughter.'
He said nothing.
'She won't find it,' she said. 'I keep it by the bed, and she doesn't come in there.'
'What happens to her if you decide to use it?'
She nodded. 'I know. I think about that all the time. I just hope she's too young to really understand. And when she's old enough, maybe she'll see it was the lesser of two evils.'
'No, what _happens_ to her? There and then? When you're in jail?'
'They don't send you to jail for self-defence.'
'Who says it's self-defence?'
'You _know_ it would be self-defence.'
'Doesn't matter what I know. I'm not the sheriff, I'm not the DA, I'm not the judge and jury.'
She went quiet.
'Think about it, Carmen,' he said. 'They'll arrest you, you'll be charged with first-degree homicide. You've got no bail money. You've got no money for a lawyer either, so you'll get a public defender. You'll be arraigned, and you'll go to trial. Could be six or nine months down the road. Could be a year. Then let's say everything goes exactly your way from that point on. The public defender makes out it's self-defence, the jury buys it, the judge apologizes that a wronged woman has been put through all of that, and you're back on the street. But that's a year from now. At least. What's Ellie been doing all that time?'
She said nothing.
'She'll have spent a year with Rusty,' he said. 'On her own. Because that's where the court would leave her. The grandmother? Ideal solution.'
'Not when they understood what the Greers are like.'
'OK, so partway through the year Family Services will arrive and haul her off to some foster home. Is that what you want for her?'
She winced. 'Rusty would send her there anyway. She'd refuse to keep her, if Sloop wasn't around any more.'
'So leave the gun out here in the desert. It's not a good idea.'
He handed it back to her. She took it and cradled it in her palms, like it was a precious object. She tumbled it from one hand to another, like a child's game. The fake pearl grips flashed in the sun.
'No,' she said. 'I want to learn to use it. For self-confidence. And that's a decision that's mine to make. You can't decide for me.'
He was quiet for a beat. Then he shrugged. 'OK,' he said. 'Your life, your kid, your decision. But guns are serious business. So pay attention.'
She passed it back. He laid it flat on his left palm. It reached from the ball of his thumb to the middle knuckle of his middle finger.
'Two warnings,' he said. 'This is a very, very short barrel. See that?' He traced his right index finger from the chamber to the muzzle. 'Two and a half inches, is all. Did they explain that at the store?'
She nodded. 'The guy said it would fit real easy in my bag.'
'It makes it a very inaccurate weapon,' he said. 'The longer the barrel, the straighter it shoots. That's why rifles are three feet long. If you're going to use this thing, you need to get very, very close, OK? Inches away would be best. Right next to the target. _Touching_ the target if you can. You try to use this thing across a room, you'll miss by miles.'
'OK,' she said.
'Second warning.' He dug a bullet out of the box and held it up. 'This thing is tiny. And slow. The pointy part is the bullet, and the rest of it is the powder in the shell case. Not a very big bullet, and not very much powder behind it. So it's not necessarily going to do a lot of damage. Worse than a bee sting, but one shot isn't going to be enough. So you need to get real close, and you need to keep on pulling the trigger until the gun is empty.'
'OK,' she said again.
'Now watch.'
He clicked out the magazine and fed nine bullets into it. Clicked the magazine back in and jacked the first shell into the breech. Took out the magazine again and refilled the empty spot at the bottom. Clicked it back in and cocked the gun and left the safety catch on.
'Cocked and locked,' he said. 'You do two things. Push the safety catch, and pull the trigger ten times. It'll fire ten times before it's empty, because there's one already in the mechanism and nine more in the magazine.'
He handed the gun to her.
'Don't point it at me,' he said. 'Never point a loaded gun at anything you don't _definitely_ want to kill.'
She took it and held it away from him, cautiously.
'Try it,' he told her. 'The safety, and the trigger.'
She used her left hand to unlatch the safety. Then she pointed it in her right and closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. The gun twisted in her grip and pointed down. The blast of the shot sounded quiet, out there in the emptiness. A chip of rock and a spurt of dust kicked off the floor ten feet away. There was a metallic ricochet _whang_ and a muted ring as the shell case ejected and the horses shuffled in place and then silence closed in again.
'Well, it works,' she said.
'Put the safety back on,' he said.
She clicked the catch and he turned to look at the horses. He didn't want them to run. Didn't want to spend time chasing them in the heat. But they were happy enough, standing quietly, watching warily. He turned back and undid his top button and slipped his shirt off over his head. Walked fifteen feet south and laid the shirt on the rim of the gulch, hanging it down and spreading it out to represent a man's torso. He walked back and stood behind her.
'Now shoot my shirt,' he said. 'You always aim for the body, because it's the biggest target, and the most vulnerable.'
She raised the gun, and then lowered it again.
'I can't do this,' she said. 'You don't want holes in your shirt.'
'I figure there isn't much of a risk,' he said. 'Try it.'
She forgot to release the safety catch. Just pulled on the unyielding trigger. Twice, puzzled why it wouldn't work. Then she remembered and clicked it off. Pointed the gun and closed her eyes and fired. Reacher guessed she missed by twenty feet, high and wide.
'Keep your eyes open,' he said. 'Pretend you're mad at the shirt, you're standing there pointing your finger right at it, like you're yelling.'
She kept her eyes open. Squared her shoulders and pointed with her right arm held level. She fired and missed again, maybe six feet to the left, maybe a little low.
'Let me try,' he said.
She passed him the gun. It was tiny in his hand. The trigger guard was almost too small to fit his finger. He closed one eye and sighted in.
'I'm aiming for where the pocket was,' he said.
He fired a double-tap, two shots in quick succession, with his hand rock-steady. The first hit the shirt in the armpit opposite the torn pocket. The second hit centrally but low down. He relaxed his stance and handed the gun back.
'Your turn again,' he said.
She fired three more, all of them hopeless misses. High to the right, wide to the left. The last hit the dirt, maybe seven feet short of the target. She stared at the shirt and lowered the gun, disappointed.
'So what have you learned?' he asked.
'I need to get close,' she said.
'Damn right,' he said. 'And it's not entirely your fault. A short-barrel handgun is a close-up weapon. See what I did? I missed by twelve inches, from fifteen feet. One bullet went left, and the other went down. They didn't even miss consistently. And I can shoot. I won competitions for pistol shooting, in the Army. Couple of years, I was the best there was.'
'OK,' she said.
He took the gun from her and squatted in the dust and reloaded it. One up the spout and nine in the magazine. He cocked it and locked it and laid it on the ground.
'Leave it there,' he said. 'Unless you're very, very sure. Could you do it?'
'I think so,' she said.
'Thinking so isn't enough. You've got to _know_ so. You've got to be prepared to get real close, jam it into his gut, and fire ten times. If you don't, or if you hesitate, he'll take it away from you, maybe turn it on you, maybe fire wildly and hit Ellie running in from her room.'
She nodded, quietly. 'Last resort.'
'Believe it. You pull the gun, from that point on, it's all or nothing.'
She nodded again.
'Your decision,' he said. 'But I suggest you leave it there.'
She stood still for a long, long time. Then she bent down and picked up the gun. Slipped it back into her bag. He walked over and retrieved his shirt and slipped it over his head. Neither bullet hole showed. One was under his arm, and the other tucked in below the waistband of his pants. Then he tracked around the gulch and picked up all eight spent shell cases. It was an old habit, and good housekeeping. He jingled them together in his hand like small change and put them in his trouser pocket.
They talked about fear on the ride home. Carmen was quiet on the way back up the rise, and she stopped again at the peak. The Red House compound stretched below them in the distant haze, and she just sat and looked down at it, both hands clasped on the horn of her saddle, saying nothing, a faraway look in her eyes. Reacher's horse stopped as usual slightly behind hers, so he got the same view, but framed by the curve of her neck and her shoulder.
'Do you ever get afraid?' she asked.
'No,' he said.
She was quiet again for a spell.
'But how is that possible?' she asked.
He looked at the sky. 'It's something I learned, when I was a little boy.'
'How?'
He looked at the ground. 'I had a brother, older than me. So he was always ahead. But I wanted to be doing the same stuff as him. He had scary comics, and anywhere we had American television he'd be watching it. So I looked at the same comics and watched the same shows. There was one show about space adventures. I don't remember what it was called. We watched it in black and white somewhere. Maybe in Europe. They had a spaceship that looked like a little submarine with spider legs. They would land it somewhere and get out and go exploring. I remember one night they got chased by this scary creature. It was hairy, like an ape. Like Bigfoot. Long hairy arms and a big snarl. It chased them back to the spaceship, and they jumped in and slammed the hatch shut just as it was climbing in after them.'
'And you were scared?'
He nodded, even though he was behind her. 'I was about four, I think. I was terrified. That night I was certain the thing was under my bed. I had this high old bed, and I knew the thing was living under it. It was going to come out and get me. I could just about feel its paw reaching up for me. I couldn't sleep. If I went to sleep, it would come out and get me for sure. So I stayed awake for hours. I would call for my dad, but when he came in, I was too ashamed to tell him. It went on like that for days and days.'
'And what happened?'
'I got mad. Not at myself for being afraid, because as far as I was concerned the thing was totally real and I _should_ be afraid. I got mad at the thing for _making_ me afraid. For threatening me. One night I just kind of exploded with fury. I yelled, "OK, come out and try it! Just damn well try it! I'll beat the shit right out of you!" I faced it down. I turned the fear into aggression.'
'And that worked?'
'I've never been scared since. It's a habit. Those space explorers shouldn't have turned and run, Carmen. They should have stood there and faced the creature down. They should have stood and fought. You see something scary, you should stand up and step _toward_ it, not away from it. Instinctively, reflexively, in a raging fury.'
'Is that what you do?'
'Always.'
'Is it what I should do? With Sloop?'
'I think it's what everybody should do.'
She was quiet for a moment. Just staring down at the house, and then lifting her eyes to the horizon beyond it. She clicked her tongue, and both horses moved off together, down the long slow slope toward the road. She shifted in the saddle to keep her balance. Reacher imitated her posture and stayed safely aboard. But not comfortably. He figured horseback riding would be one of the things he tried once and didn't repeat.
'So what did Bobby say?' she asked. 'About us?'
'He said you've been away most days for a month, and some nights, and he figured we've been up in a motel in Pecos together having an affair. Now he's all outraged that you've brought me down here, so close to Sloop getting back.'
'I wish we had been,' she said. 'In a motel, having an affair. I wish that was all it was.'
He said nothing. She paused a beat.
'Do you wish we had been, too?' she asked.
He watched her in the saddle. Lithe, slim, hips swaying gently against the patient gait of the horse. The dark honey skin of her arms was bright in the sun. Her hair hung to the middle of her back.
'I could think of worse things,' he said.
It was very late in the afternoon when they got back. Josh and Billy were waiting. They were leaning side by side against the wall of the barn, in the harsh shadow below the eaves. Their pick-up was ready for the trip to the feed supplier. It was parked in the yard.
'It takes all three of you?' Carmen whispered.
'It's Bobby,' Reacher said back. 'He's trying to keep me away from you. Trying to spoil the fun we're supposed to be having.'
She rolled her eyes. 'I'll put the horses away,' she said. 'I should brush them first.'
They dismounted together in front of the barn door. Josh and Billy peeled off the wall, impatience in their body language.
'You ready?' Billy called.
'He should have been ready a half hour ago,' Josh said.
For that, Reacher made them wait. He walked down to the bunkhouse, very slowly, because he wasn't going to let them hurry him, and because he was stiff from the saddle. He used the bathroom and rinsed dust off his face. Splashed cold water over his shirt. Walked slowly back. The pick-up had turned to face the gate and the engine was running. Carmen was brushing his horse. Thin clouds of dust were coming off its chestnut fur. _Hair? Coat?_ Josh was sitting sideways in the pick-up's driver's seat. Billy was standing next to the passenger door.
'So let's go,' he called.
He put Reacher in the middle seat. Josh swung his feet in and slammed his door shut. Billy crowded in on the other side and Josh took off toward the gate. Paused at the road and then made a left, at which point Reacher knew the situation was a lot worse than he had guessed.
SEVEN
He had seen the feed bags in the store room. There were plenty of them, maybe forty, in head-high stacks. Big waxed-paper bags, probably thirty pounds to a bag. Altogether twelve hundred pounds of feed. About half a ton. How fast were four horses and a pony going to eat their way through all of that?
But he had always understood the trip was Bobby's idea of a diversion. Fetching more feed before it was strictly necessary was as good a way as any of getting him out of Carmen's life for a spell. But they weren't fetching more feed. Because they had turned left. The bags were all printed with a brand name and nutritional boasts and the name and address of the feed supplier. The feed supplier was in San Angelo. He had seen it repeated forty times, once on each bag, in big clear letters. _San Angelo_ , _San Angelo_ , _San Angelo_. And San Angelo was north and east of Echo County. Way north and east. Not south and west. They should have turned right.
So, Bobby was planning to get him out of Carmen's life _permanently_. Josh and Billy had been told to get rid of him. And _Josh and Billy will do what they're told_ , Bobby had said. He smiled at the windshield. _Forewarned is forearmed_. They didn't know he'd seen the feed store, didn't know he'd read the writing on the bags, and they didn't know he'd been looking at maps of Texas for most of the last week. They didn't know a left turn instead of a right would mean anything to him.
_How would they aim to do it?_ Carmen had implied her out-of-work teacher friend had been scared off. Scared pretty badly, if he wouldn't even talk to her later, up in the relative safety of Pecos. So were they going to try to scare _him_? If so, they really had to be kidding. He felt the aggression building inside. He used it and controlled it the way he had learned to. He used the adrenalin flow to ease the stiffness in his legs. He let it pump him up. He flexed his shoulders, leaning on Josh on one side, Billy on the other.
'How far is it?' he asked, innocently.
'Couple hours,' Billy said.
They were doing about sixty, heading south on the dead-straight road. The landscape was unchanging. Scrubby dry grassland on the left, sullen limestone caliche on the right, broken up into ledges and layers. All of it baking under the relentless sun. There was no traffic. The road looked like it saw one or two vehicles a day. Maybe all they had to do was get far enough away, pull over, throw him out, and he'd die slowly of thirst before anybody got to him. Or of exhaustion, walking back. Or of rattlesnake bites.
'No, less than a couple hours,' Josh said. 'Hundred miles is all.'
So maybe they were headed to the bar they had mentioned yesterday. Maybe they had friends there. _They better had_ , Reacher thought. _A pair of fifth-rate cowboys ain't going to do it for me_. Then he breathed out again. Relaxed. Struggled with a decision. The problem with the kind of undiluted raging aggression he had described to Carmen was it came out so all-or-nothing. He recalled his first day in high school. The summer after he finished his elementary education, the family moved back to the States for a six-month tour. He was enrolled in a big high school, off-base, somewhere in New Jersey, somewhere near Fort Dix. And he was ready for it. In his usual serious earnest fashion he calculated that high school would be bigger and better than elementary school, in every way, including the seriousness of the locker-room scuffling. So he made his usual new-school first-day plan to jump on the very first guy who tried anything. That had always worked well for him. Hit hard, hit early, get your retaliation in first. It made a big impression. But this time, make an even bigger impression, hit harder than ever, because clearly high school was going to be a whole new kind of a deal.
So sure enough some hard kid shoved him the first morning, and ten minutes later the hard kid was on his way to the hospital for a three-week stay. Then Reacher discovered it was really a very genteel school, in a good neighbourhood, and that he'd reacted way too drastically, and everybody was looking at him like he was some sort of a barbarian. And he felt like one. He felt a little ashamed. From then on, he'd become calmer. He'd learned to be certain what he was into before he did anything. And he'd learned to offer warnings, sometimes, in certain circumstances.
'We coming straight back?' he asked.
It was a smart tactical question. They couldn't say _no_ , without alerting him. They couldn't say _yes_ , if they weren't going there in the first place.
'We're going for a couple beers first,' Billy said.
'Where?'
'Where we went yesterday.'
'I'm broke,' Reacher said. 'I didn't get paid yet.'
'We're buying,' Josh said.
'The feed store open late? On a Saturday?'
'Big order, they'll accommodate us,' Billy said.
_Maybe it was a new supplier. Maybe they changed their source_.
'I guess you use them a lot,' he said.
'All the years we've been here,' Josh said.
'Then we're going straight back?'
'Sure we are,' Billy said. 'You'll be back in time for your beauty sleep.'
'That's good,' Reacher said.
He paused.
'Because that's the way I like it,' he said.
_Mess with me now, you get what you get_.
Billy said nothing. Josh just smiled and drove.
The scenery flattened very gradually as they headed south. From his time with the maps he knew the Rio Grande was curling around toward them from the west. They were entering the river basin, where wide prehistoric waters had scoured the land. Josh kept the speed at a steady sixty. Billy stared idly out of his window. The road remained straight and featureless. Reacher rested his head on the gun rack behind him and waited. Waiting was something he was accustomed to. Many times in his career, frantic action had been preceded by a long drive. It usually happened that way. The patient accumulation of evidence, the arrival at a conclusion, the identification of a suspect, the drive out to deal with him. Waiting was a skill you learned fast, in the military.
The road got rougher the farther south they drove. The truck laboured over it. The load bed was empty, so the rear wheels bounced and skipped. There were vultures on some of the telephone poles. The sun was low in the west. There was a sign on the shoulder. It said _Echo 5 miles_. It was pocked with bullet holes.
'I thought Echo was north,' Reacher said. 'Where Ellie goes to school.'
'It's split,' Billy said. 'Half of it up there, half of it down here. Hundred sixty miles of nothing in between.'
'World's biggest town, end to end,' Josh said. 'Bigger than Los Angeles.'
He eased off the gas around a long slow curve and a cluster of small buildings came into view in the distance, all of them built low to the ground, all of them lit from behind by the low sun. There were tin advertisements on the shoulder, three miles out, announcing well in advance what the buildings were going to be. There was going to be another gas station, and a country store. And a bar, called the Longhorn Lounge, owned and operated by somebody named Harley. It had the last sign, but it was the first establishment they came to. It was a hundred feet east of the shoulder of the road, built out of tarred boards under an iron roof, crouched low at an angle in the middle of two acres of parched earth. There were ten or twelve pick-up trucks parked nose-in to the building like airplanes at a terminal. And nearest the door was the sheriff's secondhand police car, just sitting there like it had been abandoned.
Josh bumped across the parking lot and put the truck in line with the others. The bar had neon beer signs in the windows, trapped between dirty glass and faded gingham drapes. Josh turned the motor off. Put the keys in his pocket. In the sudden quiet Reacher could hear bar noise, the roar of extractor fans and air conditioners, the thump of an overworked jukebox amplifier, the rumble of talking, the chink of bottles and glasses, the click of pool balls. Sounded like a reasonable crowd in there.
Josh and Billy opened their doors together and swung out. Reacher slid out through the passenger door and stood with his back to the sun. It was still hot. He could feel heat all over him, right from the back of his neck to the heels of his shoes.
'OK,' Billy said. 'We're buying.'
There was an inside lobby with an old-fashioned pay phone and scrawled numbers and old messages creeping over the boards alongside it. Then there was a second door, with a yellow glass window in it, that led into the bar itself. Billy pushed it open.
For a military cop, walking into a bar is like a batter stepping to the plate. It's his place of business. Maybe 90 per cent of low-grade trouble in the service happens in bars. Put a bunch of young men trained for aggression and reaction alongside a limitless supply of alcohol, add in unit rivalries, add in the presence of civilian women and their civilian husbands and boyfriends, and it becomes inevitable. So just like a batter walks warily from the on-deck circle, watching the infield, surveying the outfield, calculating angles and distances, a military cop is all eyes on the way into a bar. First, he counts the exits. There are usually three. The front door, the back door out beyond the rest rooms, and the private door from the office behind the bar. Reacher saw that the Longhorn Lounge had all three of them. The windows were too small to be useful to anybody.
Then the MP looks at the crowd. He looks for knots of trouble. Who falls silent and stares? Where are the challenges? Nowhere, in the Longhorn. There were maybe twenty or twenty-five people in the long low room, all men, all tanned and lean and dressed in denim, none of them paying any kind of attention beyond casual glances and nods of easy familiarity toward Billy and Josh. The sheriff was nowhere to be seen. But there was an unoccupied stool at the bar with a fresh bottle sitting on a used napkin in front of it. Maybe the place of honour.
Then the MP looks for weapons. There was an antique revolver above the bar, wired onto a wooden plaque with a message branded into it with a hot poker: _We don't call 911_. There would be a few modern handguns here and there in the room. There were long-neck bottles all over the place, but Reacher wasn't worried about them. Bottles are no real use as weapons. Except in the movies, where they make them out of spun sugar and print the labels on tissue paper. A real bottle won't break against a table top. The glass is too thick. They just make a loud banging noise. They have some marginal use as clubs, but the pool table worried him more. It sat in the middle of the room, all covered in hard celluloid balls, four guys with four cues using it, maybe a dozen more cues vertical in a long rack on the nearest wall. Short of a shotgun, a pool cue is the best bar-room weapon ever invented. Short enough to be handy, long enough to be useful, made out of fine hardwood and nicely weighted with lead.
The air was unnaturally cold and thick with beer fumes and smoke and noise. The jukebox was near the pool table, and beyond it was an area with small round lounge tables surrounded by stools padded with red vinyl. Billy held up three fingers to the barman and got three cold bottles in exchange. He carried them laced between his fingers and led the way toward the tables. Reacher stepped ahead of him and got there first. He wanted his choice of seats. _Back to the wall_ was his rule. _All three exits in view, if possible_. He threaded his way in and sat down. Josh sat to his half-right, and Billy sat half-left. Pushed a bottle across the scarred surface of the table. People had stubbed cigarettes on the wood. The sheriff came into the room from the rear, from the direction of the rest rooms, checking his pants were zipped. He paused a second when he saw Reacher, nothing in his face, and then he moved on and sat down at the bar, on the unoccupied stool, his shoulders hunched, his back to the crowd.
Billy raised his bottle like a toast.
'Good luck,' he said.
_You're going to need it, pal_ , Reacher thought. He took a long pull from his own bottle. The beer was cold and gassy. It tasted strongly of hops.
'I need to make a phone call,' Billy said.
He pushed back from the table and stood up again. Josh leaned to his right, trying to fill the new vacant space in front of Reacher. Billy made it through the crowd and went outside to the lobby. Reacher took another sip of his beer and estimated the passage of time. And counted the people in the room. There were twenty-three of them, excluding himself, including the barman, who he guessed was Harley. Billy came back inside two minutes and forty seconds. He bent and spoke into the sheriff's ear. The sheriff nodded. Billy spoke some more. The sheriff nodded again. Drained his bottle and pushed back from the bar and stood up. Turned to face the room. Glanced once in Reacher's direction and then stepped away and pushed out through the door. Billy stood and watched him go and then threaded his way back to the table.
'Sheriff's leaving,' he said. 'He remembered he had urgent business elsewhere.'
Reacher said nothing.
'Did you make your call?' Josh asked, like it was rehearsed.
'Yes, I made my call,' Billy said.
Then he sat down on his stool and picked up his bottle.
'Don't you want to know who I called?' he said, looking across at Reacher.
'Why would I give a rat's ass who you called?' Reacher said.
'I called for the ambulance,' Billy said. 'Best to do it ahead of time, because it comes all the way from Presidio. It can take hours to get here.'
'See, we got a confession to make,' Josh said. 'We lied to you before. There was a guy we ran off. He was knocking boots with the Mexican woman. Bobby didn't think that was appropriate behaviour, in the circumstances, what with Sloop being in prison and all. So we got asked to take care of it. We brought him down here.'
'Want to know what we did?' Billy asked.
'I thought we were going to the feed store,' Reacher said.
'Feed store's up in San Angelo.'
'So what are we doing all the way down here?'
'We're telling you, is what. This is where we brought the other guy.'
'What's this other guy got to do with me?'
'Bobby figures you're in the same category, is what.'
'He thinks I'm knocking boots with her too?'
Josh nodded. 'He sure does.'
'What do you think?'
'We agree with him. Why else would you come around? You're no horseman, that's for damn sure.'
'Suppose I told you we're just good friends?'
'Bobby says you're more than that.'
'And you believe him?'
Billy nodded. 'Sure we do. She comes on to _him_. He told us that himself. So why should you be any different? And hey, we don't blame you. She's a good-looking piece of ass. I'd go there myself, except she's Sloop's. You got to respect family, even with beaners. That's the rule around here.'
Reacher said nothing.
'Her other guy was a schoolteacher,' Billy said. 'Got way out of line. So we brought him down here, and we took him out back, in the yard, and we got us a hog butchering knife, and we got us a couple of guys to hold him, and we pulled his pants down, and we told him we were going to cut it off. He was all crying and whimpering and messing himself. Begging and whining. Promising he'd get himself lost. Pleading with us not to cut. But we cut just a little anyway. For the fun of it. There was blood everywhere. Then we let him go. But we told him if we ever saw his face again, we'd take it all the way off for real. And you know what? We never saw his face again.'
'So it worked,' Josh said. 'It worked real good. Only problem was he nearly bled out, from the wound. We should have called ahead for the ambulance. We figured we should remember that, for the next time. Live and learn, that's what we always say. So this time, we did call ahead. Especially for you. So you should be grateful.'
'You cut the guy?' Reacher asked.
'We sure did.'
'Sounds like you're real proud of yourselves.'
'We do what it takes. We look after the family.'
'And you're admitting it to me?'
Josh nodded. 'Why shouldn't we? Like, who the hell are you?'
Reacher shrugged. 'Well, I'm not a schoolteacher.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'It means you aim to cut me, it'll be you goes in the ambulance.'
'You think?'
Reacher nodded. 'That horse I was on shit more trouble than you guys are going to give me.'
He looked at each of them in turn, openly and evenly. Serene self-confidence works wonders, in a situation like that. And he felt confident. It was confidence born of experience. It was a long, long time since he'd lost a two-on-one bar fight.
'Your choice,' he said. 'Quit now, or go to the hospital.'
'Well, you know what?' Josh said, smiling. 'I think we'll stay with the programme. Because whatever the hell kind of a guy you think you are, we're the ones got a lot of friends in here. And you don't.'
'I didn't enquire about your social situation,' Reacher said.
But it was clearly true. They had friends in there. Some kind of a subliminal vibe was quieting the room, making people restless and watchful. They were glancing over, then glancing at each other. The atmosphere was building. The pool game was slowing down. Reacher could feel tension in the air. The silences were starting. The challenges. Maybe it was going to be worse than two-on-one. Maybe a lot worse.
Billy smiled. 'We don't scare easy,' he said. 'Call it a professional thing.'
_They get in the ring with bulls that weigh a ton and a half_ , Bobby had said. _They ain't going to be worried about you_. Reacher had never been to a rodeo. He knew nothing about them, except for occasional passing impressions from television or the movies. He guessed the riders sat on some kind of a fence, near the pen, and they jumped on just as the bull was released out into the ring. Then they had to stay on. What was it, eight seconds? And if they didn't, they could get kicked around pretty badly. They could get stomped. Or gored, with the horns. So these guys had some kind of dumb courage. And strength. And resilience. And they were accustomed to pain and injury. But they were also accustomed to some kind of a _pattern_. Some kind of a structured build-up. Some kind of a measured countdown, before the action suddenly started. He didn't know for sure how it went. Maybe _three, two, one, go_. Maybe _ten, nine, eight_. Whatever, they were accustomed to waiting, counting off the seconds, tensing up, breathing deeply, getting ready for it.
'So let's do it,' he said. 'Right now, in the yard.'
He came out from behind the table and stepped past Josh before he could react. Walked ahead, away from the jukebox, to the right of the pool table, heading for the rest room exit. Knots of people blocked him and then parted to let him through. He heard Josh and Billy following right behind him. He felt them counting down, tensing up, getting ready. Maybe twenty paces to the exit, maybe thirty seconds to the yard. _Twenty-nine, twenty-eight_. He kept his steps even, building on the rhythm. _Twenty-seven, twenty-six_. Arms loose by his side. _Twenty-five, twenty-four_.
He snatched the last pool cue from the rack and reversed it in his hands and scythed a complete hundred-eighty-degree turn and hit Billy as hard as he could in the side of the head, _one_. There was a loud crunch of bone clearly audible over the jukebox noise and a spray of blood and Billy went down like he had been machine-gunned. He swung again, chopping full-force at Josh like a slugger swinging for the fences, _two_. Josh's hand came up to block the blow and his forearm broke clean in half. He screamed and Reacher swung again for the head, _three_ , connecting hard, knocking him sideways. He jabbed for the face and punched out a couple of teeth, _four_. Backhanded the cue with all his strength against the upper arm and shattered the bone, _five_. Josh went down head-to-toe with Billy and Reacher stood over them both and swung again four more times, fast and hard, _six_ , _seven_ , _eight_ , _nine_ , against ribs and collar bones and knees and skulls. A total of nine swings, maybe six or seven seconds of furious explosive force. _Hit hard, hit early, get your retaliation in first_. While they're still waiting for the bell.
The other men in the bar had spun away from the action and now they were crowding back in again, slowly and warily. Reacher turned a menacing circle with the cue held ready. He bent and took the truck keys from Josh's pocket. Then he dropped the cue and let it clatter to the floor and barged his way through the crowd to the door, breathing hard, shoving people out of his way. Nobody seriously tried to stop him. Clearly friendship had its limits, down there in Echo County. He made it into the lot, still breathing fast. The heat broke him out in a sweat, instantly. He made it back to the truck. Slid inside and fired it up and backed away from the building and peeled away north. The bar door stayed firmly closed. Nobody came after him.
The sun set far away in the west an hour into his drive back and it was full dark when he turned in under the ranch gate. But every light in the Red House was burning. And there were two cars parked in the yard. One was the sheriff's secondhand cruiser. The other was a lime-green Lincoln. The sheriff's car was flashing red and blue. The Lincoln was lit by the spill from the porch and the hot yellow light made it look the colour of a dead man's skin. There were clouds of moths everywhere, big papery insects crowding the bulbs above the porch like tiny individual snowstorms, forming and re-forming as they fluttered from one to the next. Behind them the chant of the night insects was already rhythmic and insistent.
The front door of the house was standing open and there was noise in the foyer. Loud excited conversation, from a small crowd of people. Reacher stepped up and looked into the room and saw the sheriff, and Rusty Greer, and Bobby, and then Carmen standing alone near the rack of rifles. She had changed out of her jeans and shirt. She was wearing a dress. It was red and black and had no sleeves. It finished at the knee. She looked numb. Conflicting emotions in her face made it blank and expressionless. There was a man in a suit at the opposite end of the room, standing near the red-framed mirror so Reacher could see the front and back of him at the same time. The Lincoln driver, obviously. He was sleek and slightly overweight, not short, not tall, dressed in pressed seersucker. Maybe thirty years old, with light-coloured hair carefully combed and receding from a domed brow. He had a pale indoor face, red with sunburn on the upward-facing planes like he played golf in the early afternoon. The face was split into a huge politician's smile. He looked like he had been receiving fulsome accolades and pretending they were completely unnecessary.
Reacher paused on the porch and decided not to enter. But his weight put a loud creak into the boards and Bobby heard it. He glanced out into the night and did a perfect double-take. Stood completely still for a second and then came hurrying through the door. Took Reacher's elbow and pulled him into the lee of the wall, alongside the entrance, out of sight of the foyer.
'What are you doing here?' he asked.
'I work here,' Reacher said. 'Remember?'
'Where are Josh and Billy?'
'They quit.'
Bobby stared at him. 'They what?'
'They quit,' Reacher said again.
'What does that mean?'
'It means they decided they didn't want to work here any more.'
'Why would they do that?'
Reacher shrugged. 'How would I know? Maybe they were just exercising their prerogative inside a free labour market.'
'What?'
Reacher said nothing. Bobby's absence and the voices on the porch had pulled people to the door. Rusty Greer was first out, followed by the sheriff and the guy in the seersucker suit. Carmen stayed inside, near the rifles, still looking numb. They all fell silent, looking at Reacher, Rusty like she had a social difficulty to deal with, the sheriff puzzled, the new guy in the suit wondering who the hell this stranger was.
'What's going on?' Rusty asked.
'This guy says Josh and Billy quit on us,' Bobby said.
'They wouldn't do that,' Rusty said. 'Why would they do that?'
The guy in the suit was looming forward, like he expected to be introduced.
'Did they give a reason?' Rusty asked.
The sheriff was looking straight at Reacher, nothing in his face. Reacher made no reply. Just stood there, waiting.
'Well, I'm Hack Walker,' the guy in the suit said, in a big honest voice, holding out his hand. 'I'm the DA up in Pecos, and I'm a friend of the family.'
'Sloop's oldest friend,' Rusty said, absently.
Reacher nodded and took the guy's hand. 'Jack Reacher,' he said. 'I work here.'
The guy held on to his hand in both of his own and beamed a subtle little smile that was partly genuine, partly _you-know-how-it-is_ ironic. A perfect politician's smile.
'You registered to vote here yet?' he asked. 'Because if so, I just want to point out I'm running for judge in November, and I'd surely like to count on your support.'
Then he started up with a self-deprecating chuckle, a man secure among friends, amused about how the demands of democracy can intrude on good manners. _You know how it is_. Reacher took his hand back and nodded without speaking.
'Hack's worked so hard for us,' Rusty said. 'And now he's brought us the most delightful news.'
'Al Eugene showed up?' Reacher asked.
'No, not yet,' Rusty said. 'Something else entirely.'
'And nothing to do with the election,' Hack said. 'You folks all understand that, don't you? I agree, November time makes us want to do something for everybody, but you _know_ I'd have done this for you anyhow.'
'And _you_ know we'd all vote for you anyhow, Hack,' Rusty said.
Then everybody started beaming at everybody else. Reacher glanced beyond them at Carmen standing alone in the foyer. She wasn't beaming.
'You're getting Sloop out early,' he said. 'Tomorrow, I guess.'
Hack Walker ducked his head, like Reacher had offered him a compliment.
'That's for sure,' he said. 'All along they claimed they couldn't do administration on the weekend, but I managed to change their minds. They said it would be the first Sunday release in the history of the system, but I just said hey, there's a first time for everything.'
'Hack's going to drive us up there,' Rusty said. 'We're leaving soon. We're going to drive all night.'
'We're going to be waiting on the sidewalk,' Hack said. 'Right outside the prison gate, seven o'clock in the morning. Old Sloop's going to get a big welcome.'
'You all going?' Reacher asked.
'I'm not,' Carmen said.
She had come out onto the porch, quietly, like a wraith. She was standing with her feet together, both hands on the railing, leaning forward from the waist, elbows locked, staring north at the black horizon.
'I have to stay and see to Ellie,' she said.
'Plenty of room in the car,' Hack said. 'Ellie can come too.'
Carmen shook her head. 'I don't want her to see her father walking out of a prison door.'
'Well, please yourself,' Rusty said. 'He's only your husband, after all.'
Carmen made no reply. Just shivered slightly, like the night air was thirty degrees instead of ninety.
'Then I guess I'll stay too,' Bobby said. 'Keep an eye on things. Sloop will understand.'
Reacher glanced at him. Carmen turned abruptly and walked back into the house. Rusty and Hack Walker drifted after her. The sheriff and Bobby stayed on the porch, each taking a half-step toward the other, to put a subliminal human barrier between Reacher and the door.
'So why did they quit?' Bobby asked.
Reacher glanced at them both and shrugged. 'Well, they didn't exactly quit,' he said. 'I was trying to sugar the pill, for the family, was all. Truth is we were in a bar, and they picked a fight with some guy. You saw us in the bar, right, sheriff?'
The sheriff nodded, cautiously.
'It was after you left,' Reacher said. 'They picked a fight and lost.'
'Who with?' Bobby asked. 'What guy?'
'The wrong guy.'
'But who was he?'
'Some big guy,' Reacher said. 'He smacked them around for a minute or two. I think somebody called the ambulance for them. They're probably in the hospital now. Maybe they're dead, for all I know. They lost, and they lost real bad.'
Bobby stared. 'Who was the guy?'
'Just some guy, minding his own business.'
'Who?'
'Some stranger, I guess.'
Bobby paused. 'Was it you?'
'Me?' Reacher said. 'Why would they pick a fight with me?'
Bobby said nothing.
'Why would they pick a fight with me, Bobby?' Reacher asked again. 'What possible kind of a reason would they have for that?'
Bobby made no reply. Just stared and then turned and stalked into the house. Slammed the door loudly behind him. The sheriff stayed where he was.
'So they got hurt bad,' he said.
Reacher nodded. 'Seems that way. You should make some calls, check it out. Then start spreading the news. Tell people that's what happens, if they start picking fights with the wrong strangers.'
The sheriff nodded again, still cautious.
'Maybe it's something you should bear in mind, too,' Reacher said. 'Bobby told me down here folks sort out their own differences. He told me they're reluctant to involve law enforcement people. He implied cops stay out of private disputes. He said it's some kind of a big old West Texas tradition.'
The sheriff was quiet for a moment.
'I guess it might be,' he said.
'Bobby said it definitely was. A definite tradition.'
The sheriff turned away. 'Well, you could put it that way,' he said. 'And I'm a very traditional guy.'
Reacher nodded.
'I'm very glad to hear it,' he said.
The sheriff paused on the porch steps, and then moved on again without looking back. He slid into his car and killed the flashing lights and started the engine. Manoeuvred carefully past the lime-green Lincoln and headed out down the driveway and under the gate. His engine was running rich. Reacher could smell unburned gasoline in the air, and he could hear the muffler popping with tiny explosions. Then the car accelerated into the distance and he could hear nothing at all except the grasshoppers clicking and chattering.
He came down off the porch and walked around to the kitchen door. It was standing open, either for ventilation or so the maid could eavesdrop on the excitement. She was standing just inside the room, close to an insect screen made of plastic strips hanging down in the doorway.
'Hey,' Reacher said. He had learned long ago to be friendly with the cookhouse detail. That way, you eat better. But she didn't answer him. She just stood there, warily.
'Let me guess,' he said. 'You only made two suppers for the bunkhouse.'
She said nothing, which was as good as a _yes_.
'You were misinformed,' he said. 'Was it Bobby?'
She nodded. 'He told me you weren't coming back.'
'He was mistaken,' he said. 'It was Josh and Billy who didn't come back. So I guess I'll eat their dinners. Both of them. I'm hungry.'
She paused. Then she shrugged. 'I'll bring them down,' she said. 'In a minute.'
He shook his head. 'I'll eat them here,' he said. 'Save you the walk.'
He parted the plastic strips with the backs of his hands and stepped inside the kitchen. It smelled of chili, left over from lunch time.
'What did you make?' he asked.
'Steaks,' she said.
'Good,' he said. 'I like bovines better than edentates.'
'What?'
'I like beef better than I like armadillo.'
'So do I,' she said.
She used pot holders and took two plates out of a warming oven. Each held a medium-sized rib-eye steak, and a large mound of mashed potato and a smaller mound of fried onion. She put them side by side on the kitchen table, with a fork on the left of the left-hand plate and a knife all the way to the right. It looked like a double-barrelled meal.
'Billy was my cousin,' she said.
'He probably still is,' Reacher said. 'Josh got it worse.'
'Josh was my cousin, too.'
'Well, I'm sorry to hear that.'
'Different branch of the family,' she said. 'More distant. And they were both fools.'
Reacher nodded. 'Not the sharpest chisels in the box.'
'But the Greers are sharp,' she said. 'Whatever it is you're doing with the Mexican woman, you should remember that.'
Then she left him alone to eat.
He rinsed both plates when he'd finished and left them stacked in the sink. Walked down to the horse barn and sat down to wait in the foul heat inside because he wanted to stay close to the house. He sat on a hay bale and kept his back to the horses. They were restless for a spell, and then they got used to his presence. He heard them fall asleep, one by one. The shuffling hoofs stopped moving and he heard lazy huffs of breath.
Then he heard feet over on the boards of the porch, and then on the steps, and then the crunch of dry dust under them as they crossed the yard. He heard the Lincoln's doors open, then shut again. He heard the engine start, and the transmission engage. He stood up and stepped to the barn door and saw the Lincoln turning round in front of the house. It was lit from behind by the porch lights, and he could see Hack Walker silhouetted at the wheel, with Rusty Greer beside him. The porch lights turned her teased-up hair to cotton candy. He could see the shape of her skull underneath it.
The big car drove straight out under the gate and swooped right without pausing and accelerated away down the road. He watched the bright cone of its headlights through the picket fence, bouncing left to right through the darkness. Then it was gone and the sounds of the night insects came back and the big moths around the lights were all that was moving.
He waited just inside the barn door, trying to guess who would come for him first. Carmen, probably, he thought, but it was Bobby who stepped out on the porch, maybe five minutes after his mother had left to bring his brother home. He came straight down the steps and headed across the yard, down toward the path to the bunkhouse. He had his ball cap on again, reversed on his head. Reacher stepped out of the barn and cut him off.
'Horses need watering,' Bobby said. 'And I want their stalls cleaned out.'
'You do it,' Reacher said.
'What?'
'You heard.'
Bobby stood still. 'I'm not doing it,' he said.
'Then I'll make you do it.'
'What the hell is this?'
'A change, is what,' Reacher said. 'Things just changed for you, Bobby, big time, believe me. Soon as you decided to set Josh and Billy on me, you crossed a line. Put yourself in a whole different situation. One where you do exactly what I tell you.'
Bobby said nothing.
Reacher looked straight at him. 'I tell you _jump_ , you don't even ask how high. You just start jumping. That clear? I own you now.'
Bobby stood still. Reacher swung his right hand, aiming a big slow roundhouse slap. Bobby ducked away from it, straight into Reacher's left, which pulled the ball cap off his head.
'So go look after the horses,' Reacher said. 'Then you can sleep in there with them. I see you again before breakfast time, I'll break your legs.'
Bobby stood still.
'Who are you going to call, little brother?' Reacher asked him. 'The maid, or the sheriff?'
Bobby said nothing. The vastness of the night closed in. Echo County, a hundred and fifty souls, most of them at least sixty or a hundred miles beyond the black horizons. The absolute definition of isolation.
'OK,' Bobby said quietly.
He walked slowly toward the barn. Reacher dropped the ball cap in the dirt and strolled up to the house, with the porch lights shining in his eyes and the big papery moths swarming out to greet him.
Two-thirds of the killing crew saw him stroll. They were doing it better than the watchers had. The woman had checked the map and rejected the tactic of driving in from the west. For one thing, the Crown Vic wouldn't make it over the desert terrain. For another, to hide a mile away made no sense at all. Especially during the hours of darkness. Far better to drive straight down the road and stop a hundred yards shy of the house, long enough for two of the team to jump out, then turn the car and head back north while the two on foot ducked behind the nearest line of rocks and worked south toward the red gate and holed up in the small craters ten yards from the blacktop.
It was the two men on foot. They had night-vision devices. Nothing fancy, nothing military, just commercial equipment bought from a sporting goods catalogue and carried along with everything else in the black nylon valise. They were binoculars, with some kind of electronic enhancement inside. Some kind of infrared capability. It picked up the night heat rising off the ground, and made Reacher look like he was wobbling and shimmering as he walked.
EIGHT
Reacher found Carmen in the parlour. The light was dim and the air was hot and thick. She was sitting alone at the red-painted table. Her back was perfectly straight and her forearms were resting lightly on the wooden surface and her gaze was blank and absolutely level, focused on a spot on the wall where there was nothing to see.
'Twice over,' she said. 'I feel cheated, twice over. First it was a year, and then it was nothing. Then it was forty-eight hours, but really it was only twenty-four.'
'You can still get out,' he said.
'Now it's less than twenty-four,' she said. 'It's sixteen hours, maybe. I'll have breakfast by myself, but he'll be back for lunch.'
'Sixteen hours is enough,' he said. 'Sixteen hours, you could be anywhere.'
'Ellie's fast asleep,' she said. 'I can't wake her up and bundle her in a car and run away and be chased by the cops for ever.'
Reacher said nothing.
'I'm going to try to face it,' she said. 'A fresh start. I'm planning to tell him, enough is enough. I'm planning to tell him, he lays a hand on me again, I'll divorce him. Whatever it takes. However long.'
'Way to go,' he said.
'Do you believe I can?' she asked.
'I believe anybody can do anything,' he said. 'If they want it enough.'
'I want it,' she said. 'Believe me, I want it.'
She went quiet. Reacher glanced around the silent room.
'Why did they paint everything red?' he asked.
'Because it was cheap,' she said. 'During the fifties, nobody down here wanted red anything, because of the Communists. So it was the cheapest colour at the paint store.'
'I thought they were rich, back then. With the oil.'
'They were rich. They still are rich. Richer than you could ever imagine. But they're also mean.'
He looked at the places where the fifty-year-old paint was worn back to the wood.
'Evidently,' he said.
She nodded again. Said nothing.
'Last chance, Carmen,' he said. 'We could go, right now. There's nobody here to call the cops. By the time they get back, we could be anywhere you want.'
'Bobby's here.'
'He's going to stay in the barn.'
'He'd hear the car.'
'We could rip out the phones.'
'He'd chase us. He could get to the sheriff inside two hours.'
'We could fix the other cars so they wouldn't work.'
'He'd hear us doing it.'
'I could tie him up. I could drown him in a horse trough.'
She smiled, bitterly. 'But you won't drown Sloop.'
He nodded. 'Figure of speech, I guess.'
She was quiet for a beat. Then she scraped back her chair and stood up.
'Come and see Ellie,' she said. 'She's so beautiful when she's asleep.'
She passed close to him and took his hand in hers. Led him out through the kitchen and into the rear lobby and up the back stairs, toward the noise of the fan turning slowly. Down the long hot corridor to Ellie's door. She eased it open with her foot and manoeuvred him so he could see inside the room.
There was a night light plugged into an outlet low on the wall and its soft orange glow showed the child sprawled on her back with her arms thrown up around her head. She had kicked off her sheet and the rabbit T-shirt had ridden up and was showing a band of plump pink skin at her waist. Her hair was tumbled over the pillow. Long dark eyelashes rested on her cheeks like fans. Her mouth was open a fraction.
'She's six and a half,' Carmen whispered. 'She needs this. She needs a bed of her own, in a place of her own. I can't make her live like a fugitive.'
He said nothing.
'Do you see?' she whispered.
He shrugged. He didn't, really. At age six and a half, he had lived exactly like a fugitive. He had at every age, right from birth to yesterday. He had moved from one service base to another, all around the world, often with no notice at all. He recalled days when he got up for school and instead was driven to an airstrip and ended up on the other side of the planet thirty hours later. He recalled stumbling tired and bewildered into dank bungalow bedrooms and sleeping on unmade beds. The next morning, his mother would tell him which country they were in. Which continent they were on. If she knew yet. Sometimes she didn't. It hadn't done him any harm.
Or, maybe it had.
'It's your call, I guess,' he said.
She pulled him back into the corridor and eased Ellie's door shut behind him.
'Now I'll show you where I hid the gun,' she said. 'You can tell me if you approve.'
She walked ahead of him down the corridor. The air conditioner was loud. He passed under a vent and a breath of air played over him. It was warm. Carmen's dress swayed with every step. She was wearing heels and they put tension in the muscles of her legs. He could see tendons in the backs of her knees. Her hair hung down her back and merged with the black pattern on the red fabric of the dress. She turned left and then right and stepped through an archway. There was another staircase, leading down.
'Where are we going?' he asked.
'Separate wing,' she said. 'It was added. By Sloop's grandfather, I think.'
The staircase led to a long narrow ground-floor hallway which led out of the main building to a master suite. It was as big as a small house. There was a dressing area, and a spacious bathroom, and a sitting room with a sofa and two armchairs. Beyond the sitting room was a broad archway. Beyond the archway, there was a bedroom.
'In here,' she said.
She walked straight through the sitting room and led him to the bedroom.
'You see what I mean?' she said. 'We're a long way from anywhere. Nobody hears anything. And I try to be quiet, anyway. If I scream, he hits me harder.'
He nodded and looked around. There was a window, facing east, with insects loud beyond the screen. There was a king-size bed close to it, with side tables by the head, and a chest-high piece of furniture full of drawers opposite the foot. It looked like it had been made a hundred years ago, out of some kind of oak trees.
'Texas ironwood,' she said. 'It's what you get if you let the mesquite grow tall.'
'You should have been a teacher,' he said. 'You're always explaining things.'
She smiled, vaguely. 'I thought about it, in college. It was a possibility, back then. In my other life.'
She opened the drawer on the top right.
'I moved the gun,' she said. 'I listened to your advice. Bedside cabinet was too low. Ellie could have found it. This is too high for her.'
He nodded again and moved closer. The drawer was a couple of feet wide, maybe eighteen inches deep. It was her underwear drawer. The pistol was lying on top of her things, which were neatly folded, and silky, and insubstantial, and fragrant. The mother-of-pearl plastic on the grips looked right at home there.
'You could have told me where it was,' he said. 'You didn't need to show me.'
She was quiet for a beat.
'He'll want sex, won't he?' she said.
Reacher made no reply.
'He's been locked up a year and a half,' she said. 'But I'm going to refuse.'
Reacher said nothing.
'It's a woman's right, isn't it?' she asked. 'To say no?'
'Of course it is,' he said.
'Even though the woman is married?'
'Most places,' he said.
Another beat.
'And it's also her right to say yes, isn't it?' she asked.
'Equally,' he said.
'I'd say yes to you.'
'I'm not asking.'
She paused. 'So is it OK for me to ask you?'
He looked straight at her. 'Depends on why, I guess.'
'Because I want to,' she said. 'I want to go to bed with you.'
'Why?'
'Honestly?' she said. 'Just because I want to.'
'And?'
She shrugged. 'And I want to hurt Sloop a little, I guess, in secret. In my heart.'
He said nothing.
'Before he gets home,' she said.
He said nothing.
'And because Bobby already thinks we're doing it,' she said. 'I figure, why get the blame without getting the fun?'
He said nothing.
'I just want a little fun,' she said. 'Before it all starts up again.'
He said nothing.
'No strings attached,' she said. 'I'm not looking for it to change anything. About your decision, I mean. About Sloop.'
He nodded. 'It wouldn't change anything,' he said.
She looked away. 'So what's your answer?' she asked.
He watched her profile. Her face was blank. It was like all other possibilities were exhausted for her, and all that was left was instinct. Early in his service career, when the threat was still plausible, people talked about what they would do when the enemy missiles were airborne and incoming. This was absolutely the number-one pick, by a huge, huge margin. A universal instinct. And he could see it in her. She had heard the four-minute warning, and the sirens were sounding loud in her mind.
'No,' he said.
She was quiet for a long moment.
'Will you at least stay with me?' she asked.
The killing crew moved fifty miles closer to Pecos in the middle of the night. They did it secretly, some hours after booking in for a second night at their first location. It was the woman's preferred method. Six false names, two overlapping sets of motel records, the confusion built fast enough to keep them safe.
They drove east on I-10 until they passed the I-20 interchange. They headed down toward Fort Stockton until they saw signs for the first group of motels serving the Balmorhea state recreation area. Those motels were far enough from the actual tourist attraction to make them cheap and anonymous. There wasn't going to be a lot of cutesy decor and personal service. But they would be clean and decent. And they would be full of people exactly like themselves. That was what the woman wanted. She was a chameleon. She had an instinct for the right type of place. She chose the second establishment they came to, and sent the small dark man to pay cash for two rooms.
Reacher woke up on Sloop Greer's sofa with the Sunday dawn. Beyond him the bedroom window faced east and the night insects were gone and the sky was bright. The bed sheet looked damp and tangled. Carmen wasn't under it. He could hear the shower running in the bathroom. And he could smell coffee.
He got off the sofa and stretched. Wandered through the archway to the bedroom. He saw Carmen's dress on the floor. He went to the window and checked the weather. No change. The sky was hazed with heat. He wandered back to the sitting area. There was a credenza in one corner, set up with a small coffee machine. There were two upturned mugs beside it, with spoons, like a hotel. The bathroom door was closed. The shower sounded loud behind it. He filled a mug with coffee and wandered into the dressing area. There were two large closets there, parallel, one on each side. Not walk-ins, just long deep alcoves screened with sliding doors made out of mirrored glass.
He opened the left-hand closet. It was hers. There was a rail full of dresses and pants on hangers. There were blouses. There was a rack of shoes. He closed it again and turned round and opened the other one. It was Sloop's. There was a rack of a dozen suits, and rows and rows of chinos and blue jeans. Cedar shelves stacked with T-shirts and dress shirts folded into plastic wraps. A rail of neckties. Belts, with fancy buckles. A long row of dusty shoes on the floor. The shoes looked to be about size eleven. He swapped his coffee cup into his other hand and nudged open a suit coat, looking for the label. It was a forty-four long. It would fit a guy about six feet two or three, maybe a hundred and ninety or two hundred pounds. So Sloop was not an especially big guy. Not a giant. But he was a foot taller and twice the weight of his wife. Not the world's fairest match-up.
There was a photograph frame face-down on top of a stack of shirts. He turned it over. There was a five-by-seven colour print under a cream card mat glassed into a lacquered wooden surround. The print showed three guys, young, halfway between boyhood and manhood. Maybe seventeen years old, maybe eighteen. They were standing close together, leaning on the bulging fender of an old-fashioned pick-up truck. They were peering expectantly at the camera, like maybe it was perched close by on a rock and they were waiting for the self-timer to click in. They looked full of youthful energy and excitement. Their whole lives ahead of them, full of infinite possibilities. One of them was Hack Walker, a little slimmer, a little more muscular, a lot more hair. He guessed the other two were Al Eugene and Sloop Greer himself. Teenage buddies. Eugene was a head shorter than Sloop, and chubby. Sloop looked like a younger version of Bobby.
He heard the shower shut off and put the photograph back and closed the slider. Moved back to the sitting area. A moment later the bathroom door opened and Carmen came out in a cloud of steam. She was wrapped in two white towels, one around her body, the other bound like a turban around her hair. He looked at her and stayed quiet, unsure of what to say.
'Good morning,' she said in the silence.
'To you, too,' he said.
She unwrapped the turban and shook out her hair. It hung wet and straight.
'It isn't, though, is it?' she said. 'A good morning? It's a bad morning.'
'I guess,' he said.
'He could be walking out the gate, this exact minute.'
He checked his watch. It was almost seven.
'Any time now,' he said.
'Use the shower if you want,' she said. 'I have to go and see to Ellie.'
'OK.'
He stepped into the bathroom. It was huge, and made out of some kind of reconstituted marble with gold tones in it. It looked like a place he'd once stayed, in Vegas. He used the john and rinsed his mouth at the sink and stripped off his stale clothes and stepped into the shower stall. It was enclosed with bronze-tinted glass and it was enormous. There was a shower head the size of a hubcap above him, and tall pipes in each corner with additional water jets pointing directly at him. He turned the faucet and a huge roaring started up. Then a deluge of warm water hit him from all sides. It was like standing under Niagara Falls. The side jets started pulsing hot and cold and he couldn't hear himself think. He washed as quickly as he could and soaped his hair and rinsed off and shut it all down.
He took a fresh towel from a stack and dried off as well as he could in the humidity. Wrapped the towel around him and stepped back into the dressing area. Carmen was buttoning her shirt. It was white, and she had white pants on. Gold jewellery. Her skin looked dark against it and her hair was glossy and already curling in the heat.
'That was quick,' she said.
'Hell of a shower,' he said.
'Sloop chose it,' she said. 'I hate it. There's so much water, I can hardly breathe in there.'
She slid her closet shut and twisted left and right to examine her reflection in the mirrored doors.
'You look good,' he said.
'Do I look Mexican enough?' she asked. 'With the white clothes?'
He said nothing.
'No jeans today,' she said. 'I'm sick of trying to look like I was born a cowgirl in Amarillo.'
'You look good,' he said again.
'Seven hours,' she said. 'Six and a half, if Hack drives fast.'
He nodded. 'I'm going to find Bobby.'
She stretched tall and kissed him on the cheek. 'Thanks for staying,' she said. 'It helped me.'
He said nothing.
'Join us for breakfast,' she said. 'Twenty minutes.'
Then she walked slowly out of the room, on her way to wake her daughter.
He dressed and found a different way back into the house. The whole place was a warren. He came out through a living room he hadn't seen before and in to the foyer with the mirror and the rifles. He opened the front door and stepped out on the porch. It was already hot. The sun was coming from low on his right, and it was casting harsh early shadows. The shadows made the yard look pocked and lumpy.
He walked down to the barn and went in the door. The heat and the smell were as bad as ever, and the horses were awake and restless. But they were clean. They had water. Their feed troughs had been filled. He found Bobby asleep in an unoccupied stall, on a bed of clean straw.
'Rise and shine, little brother,' he called.
Bobby stirred and sat up, confused as to where he was, and why. Then he remembered, and went tense with resentment. His clothes were dirty and hay stalks clung to him all over.
'Sleep well?' Reacher asked.
'They'll be back soon,' Bobby said. 'Then what do you think is going to happen?'
Reacher smiled. 'You mean, am I going to tell them I made you clean out the barn and sleep in the straw?'
'You couldn't tell them.'
'No, I guess I couldn't,' Reacher said. 'So are _you_ going to tell them?'
Bobby said nothing. Reacher smiled again.
'No, I didn't think you would,' he said. 'So stay in here until noontime, then I'll let you in the house to get cleaned up for the main event.'
'What about breakfast?'
'You don't get any.'
'But I'm hungry.'
'So eat the horse food. Turns out there's bags and bags of it, after all.'
He went back to the kitchen and found the maid brewing coffee and heating a skillet.
'Pancakes,' she said. 'And that will have to do. They'll want a big lunch, so that's where my morning is going.'
'Pancakes are fine,' he said.
He walked on into the silent parlour and listened for sounds from above. Ellie and Carmen should be moving around somewhere. But he couldn't hear anything. He tried to map the house in his head, but the layout was too bizarre. Clearly it had started out a substantial ranch house, and then random additions had been made whenever necessary. Overall, there was no coherence to it.
The maid came in with a stack of plates. Four of them, with four sets of silverware and four paper napkins piled on top.
'I assume you're eating in here,' she said.
Reacher nodded. 'But Bobby isn't. He's staying in the barn.'
'Why?'
'I think a horse is sick.'
The maid dumped the stack of plates and slid one out, leaving three of everything.
'So I'll have to carry it down to him, I guess,' she said, irritated.
'I'll take it,' Reacher said. 'You're very busy.'
He followed her back to the kitchen and she piled the first four pancakes off the skillet onto a plate. Added a little butter and maple syrup. Reacher wrapped a knife and a fork into a napkin and picked up the plate and walked back out into the heat. He found Bobby where he had left him. He was sitting up, doing nothing.
'What's this?' he said.
'Breakfast,' Reacher said. 'I had a change of heart. Because you're going to do something for me.'
'Yeah, what?'
'There's going to be some kind of a big lunch, for Sloop getting back.'
Bobby nodded. 'I expect so.'
'You're going to invite me. As your guest. Like I'm your big buddy.'
'I am?'
'Sure you are. If you want these pancakes, and if you want to walk without sticks the rest of your life.'
Bobby went quiet.
'Dinner, too,' Reacher said. 'You understand?'
'Her _husband's_ coming home, for God's sake,' Bobby said. 'It's _over_ , right?'
'You're jumping to conclusions, Bobby. I've got no particular interest in Carmen. I just want to get next to Sloop. I need to talk to him.'
'About what?'
'Just do it, OK?'
Bobby shrugged. 'Whatever,' he said.
Reacher handed him the plate of pancakes and headed for the house again.
Carmen and Ellie were sitting side by side at the table. Ellie's hair was wet from the shower and she was in a yellow seersucker dress.
'My daddy's coming home today,' she said. 'He's on his way, right now.'
Reacher nodded. 'I heard that.'
'I thought it was going to be tomorrow. But it's today.'
Carmen was looking at the wall, saying nothing. The maid brought pancakes in on a platter. She served them out, two for the kid, three for Carmen, four for Reacher. Then she took the platter away and went back to the kitchen.
'I was going to stay home from school tomorrow,' Ellie said. 'Can I still?'
Carmen said nothing.
'Mom? Can I still?'
Carmen turned and looked at Reacher, like he had spoken. Her face was blank. It reminded him of a guy he had known who had gone to the eye doctor. He had been having trouble reading fine print. The eye doctor spotted a tumour in the retina. Made arrangements there and then for him to have the eye removed the next day. Then the guy had sat around knowing that tomorrow he was going into the hospital with two eyes and coming back out with one. The certainty had burned him up. The anticipation. The dread. Much worse than a split-second accident with the same result.
'Mommy? Can I?' Ellie asked again.
'I guess,' Carmen said. 'What?'
'Mommy, you're not _listening_. Are you excited too?'
'Yes,' Carmen said.
'So can I?'
'Yes,' Carmen said again.
Ellie turned to her food and ate it like she was starving. Reacher picked at his, watching Carmen. She ate nothing.
'I'm going to see my pony now,' Ellie said.
She scrambled off her chair and ran out of the room like a miniature whirlwind. Reacher heard the front door open and close and the thump of her shoes on the porch steps. He finished his breakfast while Carmen held her fork in mid-air, like she was uncertain what to do with it, like she had never seen one before.
'Will you talk to him?' she asked.
'Sure,' he said.
'I think he needs to know it's not a secret any more.'
'I agree.'
'Will you look at him? When you're talking to him?'
'I guess so,' he said.
'Good. You should. Because you've got gunfighter's eyes. Maybe like Clay Allison had. You should let him see them. Let him see what's coming.'
'We've been through all of that,' he said.
'I know,' she answered.
Then she went off alone and Reacher set about killing time. It felt like waiting for an air raid. He walked out onto the porch and looked across the yard at the road where it came in from the north. He followed it with his eyes to where the red picket fence finished and beyond that to where it disappeared over the curve of the earth. The air was still clear with morning and there was no mirage over the blacktop. It was just a dusty ribbon framed by the limestone ledge to the west and the power lines to the east.
He turned back and sat down on the swing seat. The chains creaked under his weight. He settled sideways, facing the ranch gate, one leg up and the other on the floor. Then he did what most soldiers do when they're waiting for action. He went to sleep.
Carmen woke him maybe an hour later. She touched him on the shoulder and he opened his eyes and saw her standing over him. She had changed her clothes. Now she was in pressed blue jeans and a checked shirt. She was wearing boots made out of lizard skin. A belt to match. Her hair was tied back and she had made up her face with pale powder and blue eye shadow.
'I changed my mind,' she said. 'I don't want you to talk to him. Not yet.'
'Why not?'
'It might set him off. If he knows somebody else knows.'
'You didn't think that before.'
'I thought it over again. I think it might be worse, if we start out like that. It's better coming from me. At least at first.'
'You sure?'
She nodded. 'Let me talk to him, the first time.'
'When?'
'Tonight,' she said. 'I'll tell you tomorrow how it went.'
He sat up, with both feet on the ground.
'You were pretty sure you'd have a busted nose tomorrow,' he said.
'I think this is best,' she said.
'Why did you change your clothes?'
'These are better,' she said. 'I don't want to provoke him.'
'You look like a cowgirl, born in Amarillo.'
'He likes me like this.'
'And dressing like who you are would provoke him?'
She made a face. A defeated face, he thought.
'Don't chicken out, Carmen,' he said. 'Stand and fight instead.'
'I will,' she said. 'Tonight. I'll tell him I'm not going to take it any more.'
He said nothing.
'So don't talk to him today, OK?' she said.
He looked away. 'It's your call,' he said.
'It's better this way.'
She went back into the house. Reacher stared north at the road. Sitting down, he could see a mile less of it. The heat was up, and the shimmer was starting.
She woke him again after another hour. The clothes were the same, but she had removed the make-up.
'You think I'm doing this wrong,' she said.
He sat up and rubbed both hands over his face, like he was washing.
'I think it would be better out in the open,' he said. 'He should know somebody else knows. If not me, then his family, maybe.'
'I can't tell them.'
'No, I guess you can't.'
'So what should I do?'
'You should let me talk to him.'
'Not right away. It would be worse. Promise me you won't.'
He nodded. 'It's your call,' he said. 'But you promise _me_ something, OK? Talk to him yourself, tonight. For sure. And if he starts anything, get out of the room and just scream your head off until we all come running. Scream the place down. Demand the cops. Shout for help. It'll embarrass him. It'll change the dynamic.'
'You think?'
'He can't pretend it isn't happening, not if everybody hears you.'
'He'll deny it. He'll say I was just having a nightmare.'
'But deep inside, he'll know we know.'
She said nothing.
'Promise me, Carmen,' he said. 'Or I'll talk to him first.'
She was quiet for a beat.
'OK, I promise you,' she said.
He settled back on the swing seat and tried to doze another hour. But his internal clock was telling him the time was getting near. The way he remembered the maps of Texas, Abilene was probably less than seven hours from Echo County. Probably nearer six, for a driver who was a DA and therefore a part of the law enforcement community and therefore relatively unconcerned about speeding tickets. So assuming Sloop got out at seven without any delay, they could be home by one o'clock. And he probably would get out without any delay, because a minimum-security federal facility wouldn't have a whole lot of complicated procedures. They'd just make a check-mark on a clipboard and cut him loose.
He guessed it was nearly twelve and looked at his watch to confirm it. It was one minute past. He saw Bobby come out of the horse barn and start up the track past the car barn. He was carrying his breakfast plate, blinking in the sun, walking like his limbs were stiff. He crossed the yard and stepped up on the porch. Said nothing. Just walked on into the house and closed the door behind him.
About twelve thirty, Ellie came wandering up from the direction of the corrals. Her yellow dress was all covered in dirt and sand. Her hair was matted with it and her skin was flushed from the heat.
'I've been jumping,' she said. 'I pretend I'm a horse and I go round and round the jumps as fast as I can.'
'Come here,' Reacher said.
She stood close and he dusted her down, brushing the sand and the dirt to the floor with his palm.
'Maybe you should go shower again,' he said. 'Get your hair clean.'
'Why?'
'So you look nice for your daddy getting home.'
She thought about it, with intense concentration.
'OK,' she said.
'Be quick.'
She looked at him for a moment, and then she turned and ran into the house.
At a quarter to one, Bobby came outside. He was clean and dressed in fresh jeans and a new T-shirt. He had alligator boots on his feet. They had silver accents at the toe. He was wearing another red ball cap. It was backward on his head, and it had a flash on the side reading _Division Series 1999_.
'They lost, right?' Reacher said.
'Who?'
'The Texas Rangers. In the 1999 Division Series. To the Yankees.'
'So?'
'So nothing, Bobby.'
Then the door opened again and Carmen and Ellie came out together. Carmen was still in the cowgirl outfit. She had the make-up on again. Ellie was still in the yellow seersucker. It had been brushed more thoroughly. Her hair was wet and tied back into a ponytail with a ribbon. Carmen was holding her hand and staggering slightly, like her knees were weak.
Reacher stood up and gestured that she should sit down. Ellie climbed up and sat next to her. Nobody spoke. Reacher stepped to the porch rail and watched the road. He could see all the way to where the power lines disappeared in the haze. Maybe five miles north. Maybe ten. It was hard to be certain.
He was deep in the shadow of the porch, and the world was hot and white in front of him. He saw the dust cloud right at the extremity of his vision. It smudged in the haze and hung and drifted east, like a faint desert breeze was catching it and pushing it over toward Greer land. It grew until he could make out its shape. It was a long yellow teardrop of dust, rising and falling, dodging left and right with the curves of the road. It grew to a mile long, and many generations of it bloomed and dissipated before it came close enough for him to see the lime-green Lincoln at its head. It came up over a contour in the road and shimmered through the haze and slowed where the barbed wire gave way to the red picket fence. It looked dusty and tired and travel-stained. It braked hard close to the gate and the front end squatted as the suspension compressed. It turned in sharply. The cone of dust behind it drifted straight on south, like it had been outwitted by the abrupt change of direction.
There was a crunch of dirt and gravel and the sun flashed once in the windshield as the car came through its turn, and then three figures were clearly visible inside. Hack Walker was at the wheel. Rusty Greer was in the back seat. And there was a large pale man in the front. He had short fair hair and a plain blue shirt. He was craning his head, looking around, smiling broadly. Sloop Greer, arriving home.
NINE
The Lincoln stopped next to the porch and the suspension settled and the engine died. Nobody inside the car moved for a moment. Then three doors opened up and all three people spilled out and Bobby and Ellie clattered down the porch steps toward them. Reacher moved back from the rail. Carmen stood up slowly and stepped forward and took his place there.
Sloop Greer left his door open and stretched in the sun the way anyone would after a year and a half in a cell and six hours on the road. His face and hands were white with prison pallor and he was overweight from the starchy food, but he was Bobby's brother. There was no doubt about that. He had the same hair, the same face, the same bones, the same posture. Bobby stepped straight in front of him and held his arms wide and hugged him hard. Sloop hugged back and they staggered around and whooped and clapped each other on the back like they were on a lawn in front of a frat house and somebody had done something big in a game of college football.
Ellie froze and hung back, like she was suddenly confused by the noise and the commotion. Sloop let Bobby go and squatted down and held his arms out to her. Reacher turned and watched Carmen's face. It was locked up tight. Ellie stood in the dirt, shy and motionless, knuckles in her mouth, and then she made some kind of mental connection and launched herself into Sloop's embrace. He whirled her up into the air and hugged her. Kissed her cheek. Danced her round and round in a circle. Carmen made a small sound in her throat and looked away.
Sloop set Ellie down on the ground and looked up into the porch and smiled triumphantly. Behind him Bobby was talking to his mother and Hack Walker. They were huddled together behind the car. Sloop was holding out his hand, beckoning to his wife. She backed away from the porch rail, deep into the shadow.
'Maybe you should talk to him after all,' she whispered.
'Make your mind up,' Reacher whispered back.
'Let me see how it goes,' she said.
She took a deep breath and forced a smile and skipped down the steps. Took Sloop's hands and folded herself into his arms. They kissed, long enough so nobody would think they were brother and sister, but not so long that anybody would think there was real passion there. Behind the car Bobby and his mother had detached themselves from Hack and were walking around the hood and heading for the porch. Bobby had a worried look on his face and Rusty was fanning herself with her hand and looking hard in Reacher's direction, all the way up the steps.
'I hear Bobby invited you to lunch,' she said quietly, at the top.
'Very gracious of him,' Reacher said.
'Yes, it was. Very gracious. But it's going to be a purely family thing today.'
'Is it?' Reacher said.
'Not even Hack is staying,' she added, like it was final proof of something.
Reacher said nothing.
'So I'm sorry,' she said. 'But the maid will bring your meals down to the bunkhouse, in the usual way. You boys can get together again tomorrow.'
Reacher was silent for a long moment. Then he nodded. 'OK,' he said. 'I wouldn't want to intrude.'
Rusty smiled and Bobby avoided his eye. They walked into the house and Reacher went down the steps into the yard, out into the midday heat. It was like a furnace. Hack Walker was on his own next to the Lincoln, getting ready to leave.
'Hot enough for you?' he asked, with his politician's smile.
'I'll survive,' Reacher said.
'Going to be a storm.'
'So people say.'
Walker nodded. 'Reacher, right?'
Reacher nodded. 'So everything went OK in Abilene, I guess.'
'Like clockwork,' Hack said. 'But I'm tired, believe me. Texas is a big, big place. You can forget that, sometimes. You can drive for ever. So I'm leaving these folks to their celebrations and hitting the rack. Gratefully, let me tell you.'
Reacher nodded again. 'So I'll see you around, maybe.'
'Don't forget to vote in November,' Hack replied. 'For me, preferably.'
He used the same bashful expression he had used the night before. Then he paused at the car door and waved across the roof to Sloop. Sloop made a gun with his fingers and levelled it at Hack and pursed his lips like he was supplying the sound of the shot. Hack slid into the car and fired it up and backed into a turn and headed for the gate. He paused a second and made a right and accelerated away and a moment later Reacher was watching a new cone of dust drifting north along the road.
Then he turned back and saw Sloop strolling up across the yard, holding Ellie's hand in his right and Carmen's in his left. His eyes were screwed tight against the sun. Carmen was saying nothing and Ellie was saying a lot. They all walked straight past him and up the steps, three abreast. They paused at the door and Sloop turned his right shoulder to allow Ellie in ahead of him. He followed her across the threshold and then turned his shoulder the other way to pull Carmen in after him. The door closed on them hard enough to raise a puff of hot dust off the porch floorboards.
Reacher saw nobody except the maid for nearly three hours. He stayed inside the bunkhouse and she brought him lunch and then came back to collect the plate an hour later. From time to time he would watch the house from the high bathroom window, but it was closed up tight and he saw nothing at all. Then late in the afternoon he heard voices behind the horse barn and walked up there and found Sloop and Carmen and Ellie out and about, taking the air. It was still very hot. Maybe hotter than ever. Sloop looked restless. He was sweating. He was scuffing his shoes through the dirt. Carmen looked very nervous. Her face was slightly red. Maybe tension, maybe strain. Maybe the fearsome heat. But it wasn't impossible she'd been slapped a couple of times, either.
'Ellie, come with me to see your pony,' she said.
'I saw him this morning, Mommy,' Ellie said.
Carmen held out her hand. 'But I didn't. So let's go see him again.'
Ellie looked mystified for a second, and then she took Carmen's hand. They stepped behind Sloop and set off slowly for the front of the barn. Carmen turned her head and mouthed _talk to him_ as she walked. Sloop turned around and watched them go. Turned back and looked at Reacher, like he was seeing him for the first time.
'Sloop Greer,' he said, and held out his hand.
Up close, he was an older, wiser version of Bobby. A little older, maybe a lot wiser. There was intelligence in his eyes. Not necessarily a pleasant sort of intelligence. It wasn't hard to imagine some cruelty there. Reacher shook his hand. It was big-boned, but soft. It was a bully's hand, not a fighter's.
'Jack Reacher,' he said. 'How was prison?'
There was a split-second flash of surprise in the eyes. Then it was replaced by instant calm. _Good self-control_ , Reacher thought.
'It was pretty awful,' Sloop said. 'You been in yourself?'
_Quick, too_.
'On the other side of the bars from you,' Reacher said.
Sloop nodded. 'Bobby told me you were a cop. Now you're an itinerant worker.'
'I have to be. I didn't have a rich daddy.'
Sloop paused a beat. 'You were military, right? In the Army?'
'Right, the Army.'
'I never cared much for the military, myself.'
'So I gathered.'
'Yeah, how?'
'Well, I hear you opted out of paying for it.'
Another flash in the eyes, quickly gone. _Not easy to rile_ , Reacher thought. _But a spell in prison teaches anybody to keep things well below the surface_.
'Shame you spoiled it by crying uncle and getting out early.'
'You think?'
Reacher nodded. 'If you can't do the time, then don't do the crime.'
'You got out of the Army. So maybe you couldn't do the time, either.'
Reacher smiled. _Thanks for the opening_ , he thought.
'I had no choice,' he said. 'Fact is, they threw me out.'
'Yeah, why?'
'I broke the law, too.'
'Yeah, how?'
'Some scumbag of a colonel was beating up on his wife. Nice young woman. He was a furtive type of a guy, did it all in secret. So I couldn't prove it. But I wasn't about to let him get away with it. That wouldn't have been right. Because I don't like men who hit women. So one night, I caught him on his own. No witnesses. He's in a wheelchair now. Drinks through a straw. Wears a bib, because he drools all the time.'
Sloop said nothing. He was so silent, the skin at the inside corners of his eyes turned dark purple. _Walk away now_ , Reacher thought, _and you're confessing it to me_. But Sloop stayed exactly where he was, very still, staring into space, seeing nothing. Then he recovered. The eyes came back into focus. Not quickly, but not too slowly, either. A smart guy.
'Well, that makes me feel better,' he said. 'About withholding my taxes. They might have ended up in your pocket.'
'You don't approve?'
'No, I don't,' Sloop said.
'Of who?'
'Either of you,' Sloop said. 'You, or the other guy.'
Then he turned and walked away.
Reacher went back to the bunkhouse. The maid brought him dinner and came back for the plate. Full darkness fell outside and the night insects started up with their crazy chant. He lay down on his bed and sweated. The temperature stayed rock-steady around a hundred degrees. He heard isolated coyote howls again, and cougar screams, and the invisible beating of bats' wings.
Then he heard a light tread on the bunkhouse stair. He sat up in time to see Carmen come up into the room. She had one hand pressed flat on her chest, like she was out of breath, or panicking, or both.
'Sloop talked to Bobby,' she said. 'For ages.'
'Did he hit you?' Reacher asked.
Her hand went up to her cheek. 'No,' she said.
'Did he?'
She looked away. 'Well, just once,' she said. 'Not hard.'
'I should go break his arms.'
'He called the sheriff.'
'Who did?'
'Sloop.'
'When?'
'Just now. He talked to Bobby, and then he called.'
'About me?'
She nodded. 'He wants you out of here.'
'It's OK,' Reacher said. 'The sheriff won't do anything.'
'You think?'
Reacher nodded. 'I squared him away, before.'
She paused a beat. 'I've got to get back now. He thinks I'm with Ellie.'
'You want me to come with you?'
'Not yet. Let me talk to him first.'
'Don't let him hit you again, Carmen. Come get me, soon as you need me. Or make noise, OK? Scream and shout.'
She started back down the stairs.
'I will,' she said. 'I promise. You sure about the sheriff?'
'Don't worry,' he said. 'The sheriff won't do a thing.'
But the sheriff did one thing. He passed the problem to the State Police. Reacher found that out ninety minutes later, when a Texas Rangers cruiser turned in under the gate, looking for him. Somebody directed it all the way down past the barns and in behind the bunkhouse. He heard its motor and the sound of its tyres crushing the dust on the track. He got off his bed and went down the stairs and when he got to the bottom he was lit up by the spotlight mounted in front of its windshield. It shone in past the parked farm tractors and picked him out in a bright cone of light. The car doors opened and two Rangers got out.
They were not similar to the sheriff. Not in any way. They were in a different class altogether. They were young and fit and professional. Both of them were medium height, both of them were halfway between lean and muscled. Both had military-style buzzcuts. Both had immaculate uniforms. One was a sergeant and the other was a trooper. The trooper was Hispanic. He was holding a shotgun.
'What?' Reacher called.
'Step to the hood of the car,' the sergeant called back.
Reacher kept his hands clear of his body and walked to the car.
'Assume the position,' the sergeant said.
Reacher put his palms on the fender and leaned down. The sheet metal was hot from the engine. The trooper covered him with the shotgun and the sergeant patted him down.
'OK, get in the car,' he said.
Reacher didn't move.
'What's this about?' he asked.
'A request from a property owner to remove a trespasser.'
'I'm not a trespasser. I work here.'
'Well, I guess they just terminated you. So now you're a trespasser. And we're going to remove you.'
'That's a State Police job?'
'Small community like this, we're on call to help the local guys, their days off, or serious crimes.'
'Trespassing is a serious crime?'
'No, Sunday is the Echo sheriff's day off.'
The moths had found the spotlight. They fluttered in and crowded the lens, landing and taking off again when the heat of the bulb got to them. They batted against Reacher's right arm. They felt dry and papery and surprisingly heavy.
'OK, I'll leave,' he said. 'I'll walk out to the road.'
'Then you'll be a vagrant on a county highway. That's against the law, too, around here, especially during the hours of darkness.'
'So where are we going?'
'You have to leave the county. We'll let you out in Pecos.'
'They owe me money. I never got paid.'
'So get in the car. We'll stop at the house.'
Reacher glanced left at the trooper, and the shotgun. Both of them looked businesslike. He glanced right, at the sergeant. He had his hand on the butt of his gun. He saw in his mind the two Greer boys, two versions of the same face, both of them grinning, smug and triumphant. But it was Rusty he saw mouthing _checkmate_ at him.
'There's a problem here,' he said. 'The daughter-in-law is getting smacked around by her husband. It's an ongoing situation. He just got out of prison today.'
'She made a complaint?'
'She's scared to. The sheriff's a good old boy and she's a Hispanic woman from California.'
'Nothing we can do without a complaint.'
Reacher glanced the other way at the trooper, who just shrugged.
'Like the man told you,' he said. 'Nothing we can do without we hear about it.'
'You're hearing about it now,' Reacher said. 'I'm telling you.'
The trooper shook his head. 'Needs to come from the victim.'
'Get in the car,' the sergeant said.
'You don't have to do this.'
'Yes, we do.'
'I need to be here. For the woman's sake.'
'Listen, pal, we were informed you're trespassing. So all we got is a question of whether you're wanted here, or whether you're not. And apparently, you're not.'
'The woman wants me here. Like her bodyguard.'
'Is she the property owner?'
'No, she isn't.'
'Are you employed by her? Like officially?'
Reacher shrugged. 'More or less.'
'She paying you? You got a contract we can see?'
Reacher said nothing.
'So get in the car.'
'She's in danger.'
'We get a call, we'll come running.'
'She can't call. Or if she does, the sheriff won't pass it on.'
'Then there's nothing we can do. Now get in the car.'
Reacher said nothing. The sergeant opened the rear door. Then he paused.
'You could come back tomorrow,' he said, quietly. 'No law says a man can't try to get himself re-hired.'
Reacher took a second look at the shotgun. It was a big handsome Ithaca with a muzzle wide enough to stick his thumb in. He took a second look at the sergeant's handgun. It was a Glock, secured into an oiled leather holster by a strap that would take about half a second to unfasten.
'But right now, get in the car.'
_Checkmate_.
'OK,' Reacher said. 'But I'm not happy.'
'Very few of our passengers are,' the sergeant said back.
He used his hand on the top of Reacher's head and folded him into the back seat. It was cold in there. There was a heavy wire barrier in front of him. Either side, the door openers and the window winders had been removed. Small squares of aluminium had been riveted over the holes in the trim. The seat was vinyl. There was a smell of disinfectant and a heavy stink from an air freshener shaped like a pine tree hanging from the mirror in front. There was a radar device built up on top of the dash and quiet radio chatter coming from a unit underneath it.
The sergeant and the trooper swung in together in front and drove him up to the house. All the Greers except Ellie were on the porch to see him go. They were standing in a line at the rail, first Rusty, then Bobby, then Sloop and Carmen. They were all smiling. All except Carmen. The sergeant stopped the car at the foot of the steps and buzzed his window down.
'This guy says you owe him wages,' he called.
There was silence for a second. Just the sound of the insects.
'So tell him to sue us,' Bobby called back.
Reacher leaned forward to the metal grille.
' _¡Carmen!_ ' he shouted. ' _¡Si hay un problema, llama directamente a estos hombres!_ '
The sergeant turned his head. 'What?'
'Nothing.'
'So what do you want to do?' the sergeant asked. 'About your money?'
'Forget about it,' Reacher said.
The sergeant buzzed his window up again and pulled out toward the gate. Reacher craned his neck and saw them all turn to watch him go, all except for Carmen, who stood absolutely still and stared rigidly ahead at the spot where the car had just been. The sergeant made a right onto the road and Reacher turned his head the other way and saw them all filing back into the house. Then the sergeant accelerated hard and they were lost to sight.
'What was that you called out to them?' he asked.
Reacher said nothing. The trooper answered for him.
'It was Spanish,' he said. 'For the woman. It meant _Carmen, if there's trouble, call these guys direct_. Terrible accent.'
Reacher said nothing.
They drove the same sixty miles he had covered the other way in the white Cadillac, back to the crossroads hamlet with Ellie's school and the gas station and the old diner. The sergeant stuck to a lazy fifty-five all the way, and it took an hour and five minutes. When they got there, everything was closed up tight. There were lights burning in two of the houses, and nothing else. Then they drove the stretch where Carmen had chased the school bus. Nobody talked. Reacher sprawled sideways on the vinyl bench and watched the darkness. Another twenty minutes north he saw the turn where Carmen had come down out of the hills. They didn't take it. They just kept on going, heading for the main highway, and then Pecos beyond it.
They never got there. The radio call came in a mile short of the county line. An hour and thirty-five minutes into the ride. The call was bored and laconic and loud with static. A woman despatcher's voice.
' _Blue Five, Blue Five_ ,' it said.
The trooper unhooked the microphone and stretched the cord and clicked the switch.
'Blue Five, copy, over,' he said.
' _Required at the Red House Ranch immediately, sixty miles south of north Echo crossroads, domestic disturbance reported, over_.'
'Copy, nature of incident, over?'
' _Unclear at this time, believed violent, over_.'
'Well, shit,' the sergeant said.
'Copy, on our way, out,' the trooper said. He replaced the microphone. Turned around. 'So she understood your Spanish. I guess your accent wasn't too far off, after all.'
Reacher said nothing. The sergeant turned his head.
'Look on the bright side, pal,' he said. 'Now we can do something about it.'
'I warned you,' Reacher said. 'And you should have damn well listened to me. So if she's hurt bad, it's on you. Pal.'
The sergeant said nothing to that. Just jammed on the brakes and pulled a wide slow turn across the whole of the road, shoulder to shoulder. Got it pointing straight south again and hustled. He got it up to a hundred on the straight-aways, kept it at ninety on the curves. He didn't use the lights or the siren. Didn't even slow at the crossroads. He didn't need to. The chances of meeting traffic on that road were worse than winning the lottery.
They were back again exactly two hours and thirty minutes after they left. Ninety-five minutes north, fifty-five minutes south. First thing they saw was the sheriff's secondhand cruiser, dumped at an angle in the yard, door open, light bar flashing. The sergeant slewed through the dirt and jammed to a stop right behind it.
'Hell's he doing here?' he said. 'It's his day off.'
There was nobody in sight. The trooper opened his door. The sergeant shut down the motor and did the same.
'Let me out,' Reacher said.
'No dice, pal,' the sergeant said back. 'You stay right there.'
They got out and walked together to the porch steps. They went up. Across the boards. They pushed the door. It was open. They went inside. The door swung shut behind them. Reacher waited. Five minutes. Seven. Ten. The car grew warm. Then hot. There was silence. No sound at all beyond random static from the radio and the ticking of the insects.
The trooper came out alone after about twelve minutes. Walked slowly back to his side of the car and opened his door and leaned in for the microphone.
'Is she OK?' Reacher asked.
The guy nodded, sourly. 'She's fine,' he said. 'At least physically. But she's in a shitload of trouble.'
'Why?'
'Because the call wasn't about _him_ attacking _her_. It was the other way around. She shot him. He's dead. So we just arrested her.'
TEN
The trooper clicked the microphone and called in for back-up and an ambulance. Then he dictated an interim report to the despatcher. He used the words _gunshot wounds_ twice and _homicide_ three times.
'Hey,' Reacher called to him. 'Stop calling it homicide on the radio.'
'Why?'
'Because it was self-defence. He was beating her. We all need to get that straight, from the start.'
'Not for me to say. You, either.'
Reacher shook his head. 'It _is_ for you to say. Because what you say now counts for something later. You put it in people's heads it's a homicide, it'll be tough for her. Better that everybody's real clear from the start about what it is.'
'I don't have that kind of influence.'
'Yes, you do.'
'How would _you_ know what kind of influence I have?'
'Because I _was_ you, once upon a time. I was a cop, in the military. I called things in. I know how it works.'
The trooper said nothing.
'She's got a kid,' Reacher said. 'You should remember that. So she needs minimum bail, and she needs it tonight. You can influence that for her.'
'She shot him,' the trooper said. 'She should have thought about all that before.'
'The guy was beating up on her. It was self-defence.'
The trooper said nothing.
'Give her a break, OK? Don't make her a victim twice over.'
' _She's_ the victim? Her husband is the one lying there dead.'
'You should have sympathy. You must know how it is for her.'
'Why? What's the connection between her and me?'
Now it was Reacher who said nothing.
'You think I should cut her a break just because I'm Hispanic and she is too?'
'You wouldn't be cutting her a break,' Reacher said. 'You'd be being accurate, is all. She needs your help.'
The trooper hung up the microphone.
'Now you're offending me,' he said.
He backed out of the car and slammed the door. Walked away, up to the house again. Reacher glanced through the window to his right, toward the rocky land west of the compound, full of regret. _I knew how it would be_ , he thought. _I should have made her leave the damn gun up there on the mesa. Or I should have taken care of the whole thing myself_.
The State cops stayed inside the house and Reacher saw nothing until the back-up arrived more than an hour later. It was an identical cruiser with another trooper driving and another sergeant riding alongside him. This time the trooper was white and the sergeant was Hispanic. They got out of their car and walked straight into the house. The heat and the quiet came back. There were animal howls in the far distance and the whisper of insects and the beating of invisible wings. Lights came on in some of the house windows and then snapped off again. After twenty minutes, the Echo sheriff left. He came out of the house and stumbled down the porch steps to his car. He looked tired and disoriented. His shirt was dark with sweat. He manoeuvred his cruiser out from behind the tangle of police vehicles and drove away.
Another hour later, the ambulance came. It had its emergency lights on. Reacher saw the night pulsing red far to the south and then bright headlight beams and a boxy vehicle painted red and gold and white lurching in through the gate. It was marked _Presidio Fire Department_. Maybe it was the same truck Billy had called the night before. It turned a slow circle in the yard and backed up to the porch steps. The crew got out lazily and stretched and yawned in the dark. They knew they weren't about to be called on for their paramedic skills.
They opened the rear doors and took out a rolling gurney and the back-up sergeant met them on the steps and led them inside. Reacher was sweating inside the car. It was airless and hot. He traced in his mind the medics walking through the interior hallways to the bedroom. Attending to the corpse. Lifting it onto the gurney. Rolling the gurney out. It was going to be difficult to handle. There were narrow stairs and tight corners.
But they came back out about as fast as was feasible and lifted the gurney down the porch steps. Sloop Greer was just a large heavy shape on it, wound into a white sheet. The medics lined up the gurney with the rear of the ambulance and pushed. The wheels folded up and the gurney slid inside and the medics closed the doors on it.
Then they stood around in a group with three of the cops. The trooper whom Reacher had offended wasn't there. He must have been guarding Carmen, somewhere inside the house. The three cops out in the yard were slow and relaxed. The excitement was over. The deal was done. So they were standing there a little deflated, and maybe a little disappointed, the way cops often get, like something had happened they were supposed to prevent from happening. Reacher knew exactly how they felt.
They talked for a couple of minutes and then the ambulance crew climbed back into their cab and bounced their vehicle across the yard to the gate. It paused there for a second and turned right and headed slowly north. The cops watched it until it was gone and then they turned together and headed back inside the house. Five minutes later they came out again, all four of them, and this time they brought Carmen with them.
She was dressed in the same jeans and shirt. Her hair was heavy with water. Her hands were cuffed behind her back. Her head was down and her face was pale and filmed with sweat and her eyes were blank. The back-up cops held an elbow each. They brought her down the steps slowly and clumsily, three people moving out of step. They stopped and regrouped in the dirt and walked her over to their cruiser. The trooper opened the rear door and the sergeant placed a hand on the top of her head and folded her inside. She offered no resistance. She was completely passive. Reacher saw her shuffle sideways on the seat, looking awkward and uncomfortable with her hands trapped behind her. Then she hitched her feet in after her, pointing her toes, suddenly looking elegant again. The trooper waited a beat and closed the door on her and Rusty and Bobby came out on the porch to watch her go.
Rusty's hair was a mess, like she'd been to bed and gotten up again. She was wearing a short satin robe that shone in the porch lights. It was white, and below it her legs were as pale as the fabric. Bobby was behind her. He was in jeans and a T-shirt, and he was barefoot. They pressed up against the porch rail. Both of their faces were pale and stunned. Their eyes were wide and blank and staring.
The back-up cops climbed into their cruiser and started it up. The first two slid into the front of Reacher's car and did the same. They waited for the back-up to ease ahead and then followed it out to the gate. Reacher turned his head and saw Rusty and Bobby craning to watch them go. The cars paused and turned right together and accelerated north. Reacher turned his head the other way and the last thing he saw was Ellie stumbling out onto the porch. She was in her rabbit pyjamas and was carrying a small bear in her left hand and had the knuckles of her right pressed hard into her mouth.
The inside of the cop car cooled right down after about a mile. There was an aperture in the wire grille in front of him and if he sat in the middle of the seat and ducked his head he could line it up with the view through the windshield above the radar unit and below the mirror. It was like watching a movie unfold in front of him. The back-up car swayed in the headlight beams, close and vivid and unreal in the intense dusty blackness all around it. He couldn't see Carmen. Maybe she was slumped down in the seat and her head was hidden behind the police lights stacked along the rear shelf, behind the glass.
'Where are they taking her?' he called.
The sergeant shifted in his seat. Answered a hundred yards later.
'Pecos,' he said. 'County jail.'
'But this is Echo,' Reacher said. 'Not Pecos.'
'There are a hundred and fifty people in Echo County. You think they operate a separate jurisdiction just for them? With jails and all? And courthouses?'
'So how does it work?'
'Pecos picks it up, that's how it works. For all the little counties, around and about. All the administrative functions.'
Reacher was quiet for a beat. 'Well, that's going to be a real big problem,' he said.
'Why?'
'Because Hack Walker is the Pecos DA. And he was Sloop Greer's best buddy. So he'll be prosecuting the person who shot his friend.'
'Worried about a conflict of interest?'
'Aren't you?'
'Not really,' the sergeant said. 'We know Hack. He's not a fool. He sees some defence counsel about to nail him for an impropriety, he'll pass on it. He'll have to. What's the word, excuse himself?'
'Recuse,' Reacher said.
'Whatever. He'll give it to an assistant. And I think both the Pecos ADAs are women, actually. So the self-defence thing will get some sympathy.'
'It doesn't need sympathy,' Reacher said. 'It's plain as day.'
'And Hack's running for judge in November,' the sergeant said. 'Bear that in mind. Lots of Mexican votes in Pecos County. He won't let anybody do anything that'll give her lawyer a chance to make him look bad in the newspaper. So she's lucky, really. A Mexican woman shoots a white man in Echo, gets tried for it by a woman ADA in Pecos, couldn't be better for her.'
'She's from California,' Reacher said. 'She's not Mexican.'
'But she looks Mexican,' the sergeant said. 'That's what's important to a guy who needs votes in Pecos County.'
The two State Police cruisers drove on in convoy. They caught and passed the ambulance just short of the school and the gas station and the diner at the crossroads. Left it lumbering north in their wake.
'The morgue's in Pecos, too,' the sergeant said. 'One of the oldest institutions in town, I guess. They needed it right from the get-go. Pecos was that kind of a place.'
Reacher nodded, behind him. 'Carmen told me,' he said. 'It was the real Wild West.'
'You going to stick around?'
'I guess so. I need to see she's OK. She told me there's a museum in town. Things to see. Somebody's grave.'
'Clay Allison's,' the sergeant said. 'Some old gunslinger.'
'Never killed a man who didn't need killing.'
The sergeant nodded in the mirror. 'That could be her position, right? She could call it the Clay Allison defence.'
'Why not?' Reacher said. 'It was justifiable homicide, any way you cut it.'
The sergeant said nothing to that.
'Should be enough to make bail, at least,' Reacher said. 'She's got a kid back there. She needs bail, like tomorrow.'
The sergeant glanced in the mirror again. 'Tomorrow could be tough,' he said. 'There's a dead guy in the picture, after all. Who's her lawyer?'
'Hasn't got one.'
'She got money for one?'
'No.'
'Well, shit,' the sergeant said.
'What?' Reacher asked.
'How old is the kid?'
'Six and a half.'
The sergeant went quiet.
'What?' Reacher asked again.
'Having no lawyer is a big problem, is what. Kid's going to be seven and a half before Mom even gets a bail _hearing_.'
'She'll get a lawyer, right?'
'Sure, constitution says so. But the question is, when? This is Texas.'
'You ask for a lawyer, you don't get one right away?'
'Not right away. You wait a long, long time. You get one when the indictment comes back. And that's how old Hack Walker is going to avoid his little conflict problem, isn't it? He'll just lock her up and forget about her. He'd be a fool not to. She's got no lawyer, who's to know? Could be Christmas before they get around to indicting her. By which time old Hack will be a judge, most likely, not a prosecutor. He'll be long gone. No more conflict of interest. Unless he happens to pull the case later, whereupon he'd have to excuse himself anyway.'
'Recuse.'
'Whatever, not having her own lawyer changes everything.'
The trooper in the passenger seat turned and spoke for the first time in an hour.
'See?' he said. 'Didn't matter what I called it on the radio.'
'So don't you spend your time at the museum,' the sergeant said. 'You want to help her, you go find her a lawyer. You go beg, borrow or steal her one.'
Nobody spoke the rest of the way into Pecos County. They crossed under Interstate 10 and followed the back-up car across more empty blackness all the way to Interstate 20, about a hundred miles west of where Reacher had forced his way out of Carmen's Cadillac sixty hours previously. The sergeant slowed the car and let the back-up disappear ahead into the darkness. He braked and pulled off onto the shoulder a hundred yards short of the cloverleaf.
'We're back on patrol from here,' he said. 'Time to let you out.'
'Can't you drive me to the jail?'
'You're not going to jail. You haven't done anything. And we're not a taxicab company.'
'So where am I?'
The sergeant pointed straight ahead.
'Downtown Pecos,' he said. 'Couple miles, that way.'
'Where's the jail?'
'Crossroads before the railroad. In the courthouse basement.'
The sergeant opened his door and slid out and stretched. Stepped back and opened Reacher's door with a flourish. Reacher slid out feet first and stood up. It was still hot. Haze hid the stars. Lonely vehicles whined by on the highway bridge, few enough in number for absolute silence to descend between each one. The shoulder was sandy, and stunted velvet mesquite and wild indigo struggled at its margin. The cruiser's headlights picked out old dented beer cans tangled among the stalks.
'You take care now,' the sergeant said.
He climbed back into his seat and slammed his door. The car crunched its way back to the blacktop and curved to the right, onto the cloverleaf, up onto the highway. Reacher stood and watched its tail lights disappear in the east. Then he set off walking north, under the overpass, toward the neon glow of Pecos.
He walked through one pool of light after another, along a strip of motels which got smarter and more expensive the farther he moved away from the highway. Then there was a rodeo arena set back from the street with posters still in place from a big event a month ago. _There's a rodeo there in July_ , Carmen had said, _but you've missed it for this year_. He walked in the road because the sidewalks had long tables set up on them, like outdoor market stalls. They were all empty. But he could smell cantaloupe on the hot night air. _The sweetest in the whole of Texas_ , she had said. _Therefore, in their opinion, in the whole of the world_. He guessed an hour before dawn old trucks would roll in loaded with ripe fruit from the fields, maybe hosed down with irrigation water to make it look dewy and fresh and attractive. Maybe the old trucks would have whole families crammed in the cabs ready to unload and sell all day and find out whether their winter was going to be good or bad, lean or prosperous. But really he knew nothing at all about agriculture. All his ideas came from the movies. Maybe it was all different in reality. Maybe there were government subsidies involved, or giant corporations.
Beyond the cantaloupe market was a pair of eating places. There was a doughnut shop, and a pizza parlour. Both of them were dark and closed up tight. Sunday, the middle of the night, miles from anywhere. At the end of the strip was a crossroads, with a sign showing the museum was straight across. But before the turn, on the right, was the courthouse. It was a nice enough building, but he didn't spend any time looking at it. Just ducked round the side to the back. No jail he had ever seen had an entrance on the street. There was a lit doorway in the back wall at semi-basement level with two cement steps leading down from a parking area. There was a dusty four-cylinder Chevrolet in one corner. The lot was fenced with razor wire and hung with large notices warning unauthorized parkers their cars would be towed. There were yellow light bulbs mounted on the fence posts. Clouds of silent insects crowded each of them. The blacktop was still hot under his feet. No cooling breezes back there. The jail door was scarred steel and had _No Admittance_ stencilled across it in faded paint. Above it was a small video camera angled down, with a red diode glowing above the lens.
He went down the steps and knocked hard on the door. Stepped back a pace so the camera could pick him up. Nothing happened for a long moment. He stepped forward and knocked again. There was the click of a lock and a woman opened the door. She was dressed in a court bailiff's uniform. She was white, maybe fifty, with grey hair dyed the colour of sand. She had a wide belt loaded with a gun and a nightstick and a can of pepper spray. She was heavy and slow, but she looked awake and on the ball.
'Yes?' she said.
'You got Carmen Greer in here?'
'Yes.'
'Can I see her?'
'No.'
'Not even for a minute?'
'Not even.'
'So when can I?'
'You family?'
'I'm a friend.'
'Not a lawyer, right?'
'No.'
'Then Saturday,' the woman said. 'Visiting is Saturday, two to four.'
_Almost a week_.
'Can you write that down for me?' he said. He wanted to get inside. 'Maybe give me a list of what I'm allowed to bring her?'
The bailiff shrugged and turned and stepped inside. Reacher followed her into the dry chill of an air conditioner running on high. There was a lobby. The bailiff had a high desk, like a lectern. Like a barrier. Behind it were cubbyholes covering the back wall. He saw Carmen's lizard skin belt rolled into one of them. There was a small Ziplock bag with the fake ring in it. Off to the right was a barred door. A tiled corridor beyond.
'How is she?' he asked.
The bailiff shrugged again. 'She ain't happy.'
'About what?'
'About the cavity search, mainly. She was screaming fit to burst. But rules are rules. And what, she thinks I enjoy it either?'
She pulled a mimeographed sheet from a stack. Slid it across the top of the desk.
'Saturday, two to four,' she said. 'Like I told you. And don't bring her anything that's not on the list, or we won't let you in.'
'Where's the DA's office?'
She pointed at the ceiling. 'Second floor. Go in the front.'
'When does it open?'
'About eight-thirty.'
'You got bail bondsmen in the neighbourhood?'
She smiled. 'Ever see a courthouse that didn't? Turn left at the crossroads.'
'What about lawyers?'
'Cheap lawyers or expensive lawyers?'
'Free lawyers.'
She smiled again. 'Same street,' she said. 'That's all it is, bondsmen and community lawyers.'
'Sure I can't see her?'
'Saturday, you can see her all you want.'
'Not now? Not even for a minute?'
'Not even.'
'She's got a daughter,' Reacher said, irrelevantly.
'Breaks my heart,' the woman said back.
'When will you see her?'
'Every fifteen minutes, whether she likes it or not. Suicide watch, although I don't think your friend is the type. You can tell pretty easy. And she's a tough cookie. That's my estimation. But rules are rules, right?'
'Tell her Reacher was here.'
'Who?'
'Reacher. Tell her I'll stick around.'
The woman nodded, like she'd seen it all, which she probably had.
'I'm sure she'll be thrilled,' she said.
Then Reacher walked back to the motel strip, remembering all the jailhouse duty he'd pulled early in his career, wishing he could put his hand on his heart and say he'd acted a whole lot better than the woman he'd just met.
He walked almost all the way back to the highway, until the prices ducked under thirty bucks. Picked a place and woke the night clerk and bought the key to a room near the end of the row. It was worn and faded and crusted with the kind of dirt that shows the staff isn't all the way committed to excellence. The bedding was limp and the air smelled dank and hot, like they saved power by turning the air conditioning off when the room wasn't rented. But it was serviceable. One advantage of being ex-military was almost any place was serviceable. There was always somewhere worse to compare it with.
He slept restlessly until seven in the morning and showered in tepid water and went out for breakfast at the doughnut shop halfway back to the courthouse. It was open early and advertised Texas-sized doughnuts. They were larger than normal, and more expensive. He ate two with three cups of coffee. Then he went looking for clothes. Since he ended his brief flirtation with owning a house he had gone back to his preferred system of buying cheap items and junking them instead of laundering them. It worked well for him. It kept the permanence monkey off his back, literally.
He found a cheap store that had already been open an hour. It sold a little bit of everything, from bales of cheap toilet paper to work boots. He found a rack of chinos with the brand labels cut out. Maybe they were flawed. Maybe they were stolen. He found the right size and paired them with a khaki shirt. It was thin and cut loose like something from Hawaii, but it was plain, and it cost less than a Texas-sized doughnut. He found white underwear. The store had no fitting rooms. It wasn't that kind of place. He talked the clerk into letting him use the staff bathroom. He put on the new gear and transferred his stuff from pocket to pocket. He still had the eight shell cases from Carmen's Lorcin, rattling around like loose change. He weighed them in his hand and then dropped them in his new pants pocket.
He balled up the old clothes and stuffed them in the bathroom trash. Went back out to the register and paid thirty bucks in cash. He might get three days out of it. Ten bucks a day, just for clothes, made no sense at all until you figured a washing machine cost four hundred and a dryer another three and the basement to put them in implied a house which cost at least a hundred grand to buy and then tens of thousands a year in taxes and maintenance and insurance and associated bullshit. Then ten bucks a day for clothes suddenly made all the sense in the world.
He waited on the sidewalk until eight o'clock, leaning against a wall under an awning to stay out of the sun. He figured the bailiffs would change shifts at eight. That would be normal. And sure enough at five minutes past he saw the heavy woman drive herself out of the lot in the dusty four-cylinder Chevrolet. She made a left and drove right past him. He crossed the street and walked down the side of the courthouse again. _If the night shift won't help you, maybe the day shift will_. Night workers are always tougher. Less regular contact with the public, less immediate supervision, makes them think they're king of the castle.
But the day worker was just as bad. He was a man, a little younger, a little thinner, but otherwise the exact equivalent of his opposite number. The conversation was just the same. _Can I see her? No. When, then? Saturday. Is she OK? As well as can be expected_. It sounded like something you would hear in front of a hospital, from a cautious spokesperson. The guy confirmed only lawyers were allowed unrestricted access to the prisoners. So Reacher came back up the steps and went out looking for a lawyer.
It was clear that the events of the previous night had left the red house stunned and quiet. And depopulated, which suited the killing crew just fine. The ranch hands weren't there, the tall stranger was gone, and Carmen Greer was gone. And her husband, obviously. That left just the old woman, the second son, and the granddaughter. Three of them, all at home. It was Monday, but the kid hadn't gone to school. The bus came and went without her. She just hung around, in and out of the barn. She looked confused and listless. They all did. Which made them easier to watch. Better targets.
The two men were behind a rock, opposite the ranch gate, well hidden and elevated about twenty feet up the slope. Their view was good enough. The woman had dropped them three hundred yards north and driven back toward Pecos.
'When do we do this?' they had asked her.
'When I say,' she had replied.
Reacher turned left at the crossroads in the centre of Pecos and followed a street that ran parallel with the railroad tracks. He passed the bus depot and hit a strip that might have started out as anything but now was made up entirely of low-rent operations serving the courthouse population, bail bondsmen and storefront legal missions, like the night shift woman had said. The legal missions all had rows of desks facing the store windows with customer chairs in front of them and waiting areas inside the doors. All of them were grimy and undecorated and messy, with piles of files everywhere, and notes and memos taped and tacked to the walls next to the desks. Twenty past eight in the morning, they were all busy. They all had patient knots of people waiting inside and anxious clients perched on the customer chairs. Some of the clients were on their own, but most of them were in family groups, some of them with a bunch of children. All of them were Hispanic. So were some of the lawyers, but overall they were a mixed bunch. Men, women, young, old, bright, defeated. The only thing they had in common was they all looked harassed to breaking point.
He chose the only establishment that had an empty chair in front of a lawyer. It was halfway down the street and the chair was way in back of the store and the lawyer was a young white woman of maybe twenty-five with thick dark hair cut short. She had a good tan and was wearing a white sports bra instead of a shirt and there was a leather jacket slung over the back of her chair. She was nearly hidden behind two tall stacks of files. She was on the phone, and she was on the point of tears.
He approached her desk and waited for a _sit down_ gesture. He didn't get one, but he sat down anyway. She glanced at him and glanced away. Kept on talking into the phone. She had dark eyes and white teeth. She was talking slow Spanish with an East Coast accent, haltingly enough that he could follow most of it. She was saying _yes, we won_. Then _but he won't pay. He simply won't. He just refuses_. Time to time she would stop and listen to whoever was on the other end. Then she would repeat herself. _We won, but he still won't pay_. Then she listened again. The question must have been _so what do we do now_ , because she said _we go back to court, to enforce the judgement_. Then the question was obviously _how long does that take_ because she went very quiet and said _a year. Maybe two_. Reacher heard clear silence at the other end and watched the woman's face. She was upset and embarrassed and humiliated. Blinking back tears of bitter frustration. She said _llamaré de nuevo más tarde_ and hung up. _I'll call again soon_.
Then she faced front and closed her eyes and breathed deeply through her nose, in and out, in and out. She rested her hands palms-down on the desk. Breathed some more. Maybe it was a relaxation technique they taught you in law school. But it didn't seem to be working. She opened her eyes and dropped a file into a drawer and focused between the piles of paper across the desk at Reacher.
'Problem?' he asked her.
She shrugged and nodded all at the same time. An all-purpose expression of misery.
'Winning the case is only half the battle,' she said. 'Sometimes a lot less than half, believe me.'
'So what happened?'
She shook her head. 'We don't need to go into it.'
'Some guy won't pay up?' Reacher said.
She shrugged and nodded again. 'A rancher,' she said. 'Crashed his car into my client's truck. Injured my client and his wife and two of his children. It was early in the morning. He was on his way back from a party, drunk. They were on their way to market. It was harvest time and they couldn't work the fields and they lost their whole crop.'
'Cantaloupe?'
'Bell peppers, actually. Rotted on the vine. We sued and won twenty thousand dollars. But the guy won't pay. He just refuses. He's waiting them out. He plans to starve them back to Mexico, and he will, because if we have to go back to court it'll take at least another year and they can't live another whole year on fresh air, can they?'
'They didn't have insurance?'
'Premiums are way too expensive. These people are barely scratching a living. All we could do was proceed directly against the rancher. Solid case, well presented, and we won. But the old guy is sitting tight, with a big smirk on his damn face.'
'Tough break,' Reacher said.
'Unbelievable,' she said. 'The things these people go through, you just wouldn't believe it. This family I'm telling you about, the Border Patrol killed their eldest son.'
'They did?'
She nodded. 'Twelve years ago. They were illegals. Paid their life savings to some guide to get them here, and he just abandoned them in the desert. No food, no water, they're holing up in the daytime and walking north at night, and a patrol chases them in the dark with rifles and kills their eldest boy. They bury him and walk on.'
'Anything get done about it?'
'Are you kidding? They were illegals. They couldn't do anything. It happens all the time. Everybody's got a story like that. And now they're settled and been through the immigration amnesty, we try to get them to trust the law, and then something like this happens. I feel like such a fool.'
'Not your fault.'
'It is my fault. I should know better. _Trust us_ , I tell them.'
She went quiet and Reacher watched her try to recover.
'Anyway,' she said, and then nothing more. She looked away. She was a good-looking woman. It was very hot. There was a single air conditioner stuck in the fanlight over the door, a big old thing, along way away. It was doing its best.
'Anyway,' she said again. Looked at him. 'How can I help you?'
'Not me,' Reacher said. 'A woman I know.'
'She needs a lawyer?'
'She shot her husband. He was abusing her.'
'When?'
'Last night. She's across the street, in jail.'
'Is he dead?'
Reacher nodded. 'As a doornail.'
Her shoulders sagged. She opened a drawer and took out a yellow pad.
'What's your name?' she asked.
'My name?'
'You're the one talking to me.'
'Reacher,' he said. 'What's your name?'
She wrote _Reacher_ on the pad, first line.
'Alice,' she said. 'Alice Amanda Aaron.'
'You should go into private practice. You'd be first in the Yellow Pages.'
She smiled, just a little. 'One day, I will,' she said. 'This is a five-year bargain with my conscience.'
'Paying your dues?'
'Atoning,' she said. 'For my good fortune. For going to Harvard Law. For coming from a family where twenty thousand dollars is a month's common charge on the Park Avenue co-op instead of life or death during the winter in Texas.'
'Good for you, Alice,' he said.
'So tell me about your woman friend.'
'She's of Mexican heritage and her husband was white. Her name is Carmen Greer and her husband was Sloop Greer.'
'Sloop?'
'Like a boat.'
'OK,' Alice said, and wrote it all down.
'The abuse stopped for the last year and a half because he was in prison for tax evasion. He got out yesterday and started it up again and she shot him.'
'OK.'
'Evidence and witnesses are going to be hard to find. The abuse was covert.'
'Injuries?'
'Fairly severe. But she always passed them off as accidental, to do with horses.'
'Horses?'
'Like she fell off them.'
'Why?'
Reacher shrugged. 'I don't know. Family dynamic, coercion, shame, fear, embarrassment maybe.'
'But there's no doubt the abuse happened?'
'Not in my mind.'
Alice stopped writing. Stared down at the yellow paper.
'Well, it's not going to be easy,' she said. 'Texas law isn't _too_ far behind the times on spousal abuse, but I'd prefer lots of clear evidence. But his spell in prison helps us. Not a model citizen, is he? We could plead it down to involuntary manslaughter. Maybe settle for time served, with probation. If we work hard, we stand a chance.'
'It was justifiable homicide, not manslaughter.'
'I'm sure it was, but it's a question of what will work, and what won't.'
'And she needs bail,' Reacher said. 'Today.'
Alice looked up from the paper and stared at him. 'Bail?' she repeated, like it was a foreign word. 'Today? Forget about it.'
'She's got a kid. A little girl, six and a half.'
She wrote it down. 'Doesn't help,' she said. 'Everybody's got kids.'
She ran her fingers up and down the tall stacks of files.
'They've all got kids,' she said again. 'Six and a half, one and a half, two kids, six, seven, ten.'
'She's called Ellie,' Reacher said. 'She needs her mother.'
Alice wrote _Ellie_ on the pad, and connected it with an arrow to _Carmen Greer_.
'Only two ways to get bail in a case like this,' she said. 'First way is we stage essentially the whole trial at the bail hearing. And we're not ready to do that. It'll be months before I can even _start_ working on it. My calendar is totally full. And even when I _can_ start, it'll take months to prepare, in these circumstances.'
'What circumstances?'
'Her word against a dead man's reputation. If we've got no eyewitnesses, we'll have to subpoena her medical records and find experts who can testify her injuries weren't caused by falling off horses. And clearly she's got no money, or you wouldn't be in here on her behalf, so we're going to have to find some experts who'll appear for free. Which isn't impossible, but it can't be done in a hurry.'
'So what can be done in a hurry?'
'I can run over to the jail and say _hi, I'm your lawyer, I'll see you again in a year_. That's about all can be done in a hurry.'
Reacher glanced around the room. It was teeming with people.
'Nobody else will be faster,' Alice said. 'I'm relatively new here. I've got less of a backlog.'
It seemed to be true. She had just two head-high stacks of files on her desk. The others all had three or four or five.
'What's the second way?'
'Of what?'
'Getting bail. You said there were two ways.'
She nodded. 'Second way is we convince the DA not to oppose it. If we stand up and ask for bail and he stands up and says he has no objection, then all that matters is whether the judge thinks it's appropriate. And the judge will be influenced by the DA's position, probably.'
'Hack Walker was Sloop Greer's oldest buddy.'
Alice's shoulders sagged again. 'Great,' she said. 'He'll recuse himself, obviously. But his staff will go to bat for him. So forget bail. It isn't going to happen.'
'But will you take the case?'
'Sure I will. That's what we do here. We take cases. So I'll call Hack's office, and I'll go see Carmen. But that's all I can do right now. You understand? Apart from that, right now taking the case is the same thing as not taking the case.'
Reacher sat still for a second. Then he shook his head. 'Not good enough, Alice,' he said. 'I want you to get to work right now. Make something happen.'
'I can't,' she said. 'Not for months. I told you that.'
She went quiet and he watched her for a second more.
'You interested in a deal?' he asked.
'A deal?'
'Like I help you, you help me.'
'How can you help me?'
'There are things I could do for you. Like, I could recover the twenty grand for your pepper growers. Today. And then you could start work for Carmen Greer. Today.'
'What are you, a debt collector?'
'No, but I'm a quick learner. It's probably not rocket science.'
'I can't let you do that. It's probably illegal. Unless you're registered somewhere.'
'Just suppose the next time you saw me I was walking back in here with a cheque for twenty grand in my pocket?'
'How would you do that?'
He shrugged. 'I'd just go ask the guy for it.'
'And that would work?'
'It might,' he said.
She shook her head. 'It would be unethical.'
'As opposed to what?'
She didn't answer for a long time. Just stared off somewhere behind his head. But then he saw her glance down at the phone. He saw her rehearsing the good news call in her mind.
'Who's the rancher?' he asked.
She glanced at the drawer. Shook her head again. 'I can't tell you,' she said. 'I'm worried about the ethics.'
'I'm offering,' he said. 'You're not asking.'
She sat still.
'I'm volunteering,' he said. 'Like a paralegal assistant.'
She looked straight at him. 'I have to go to the bathroom,' she said.
She stood up suddenly and walked away. She was wearing denim shorts, and she was taller than he had guessed. Short shorts, long legs. A fine tan. Walking, she looked pretty good from the back. She went through a door in the rear wall of the old store. He stood up and leaned over the desk and pulled open the drawer. Lifted the top file out and reversed it so he could read it. It was full of legal paper. He shuffled through to some kind of a deposition printed on a single sheet. There was a name and address typed neatly in a box labelled _Defendant_. He folded the paper into quarters and put it in his shirt pocket. Closed the file and dropped it back in the drawer. Hooked the drawer shut and sat down again. A moment later Alice Amanda Aaron came out through the rear door and walked back to the desk. She looked pretty good from the front, too.
'Any place around here I can borrow a car?' he asked her.
'You don't have one?'
He shook his head.
'Well, you can borrow mine, I guess,' she said. 'It's in the lot, behind the building.'
She fiddled in her jacket pocket, behind her. Came out with a set of keys.
'It's a VW,' she said.
He took the keys from her.
'There are maps in the glove box,' she said. 'You know, in case a person isn't familiar with the area.'
He pushed back from the desk. 'Maybe I'll catch you later,' he said.
She said nothing. He stood up and walked through the quiet crowd of people and out into the sun.
ELEVEN
Alice's car was the only VW in the lot behind the building. It was baking in the sun right in the centre, a new-shape Beetle, bright yellow in colour, New York plates, about a year and a half old, and there was more than a bunch of maps in the glove box. There was a handgun in there, too.
It was a beautiful nickel-finished Heckler & Koch P7M10, four-inch barrel, ten .40 calibre shells. In Reacher's day the Army had wanted the same thing in the 9mm blued-steel version, but the Defense Department had baulked at the cost, which must have been about sixteen times the price of Carmen Greer's eighty-dollar Lorcin. It was a fine, fine piece. One of the best available. Maybe it was a gift from the family back on Park Avenue. Maybe the car was, too. He could just imagine it. The VW was an easy choice. The perfect graduation present. But the gun might have caused some consternation. The parents would have been sitting up there on their high floor in New York, worrying about it. _She's going to work where? With poor people? She'll need protection, surely_. So they would have researched the whole matter thoroughly and gone out and bought her the best on the market, like they would have bought her a Rolex if she had needed a watch.
Out of habit he took it apart and checked the action and reassembled it. It was new, but it had been fired and cleaned maybe four or five times. It spoke of conscientious hours put in at the practice range. Maybe some exclusive Manhattan basement. He smiled. Slotted it back in the glove box, under the maps. Then he racked the seat all the way back and fiddled with the key and fired the engine up and started the air running. He took the maps out of the glove box and spread them on the empty seat beside him. Took the folded paper from his shirt pocket and checked the maps for the rancher's address. It seemed to be somewhere north and east of town, maybe an hour away if he hustled hard.
The VW had a manual transmission with a sharp clutch and he stalled twice before he got the hang of driving it. He felt awkward and conspicuous. The ride was firm and there was some kind of a bud vase attached to the dash, loaded with a little pink bloom that was reviving steadily as the car got colder. There was subtle perfume in the air. He had learned to drive nearly twenty-five years before, underage and illegally, in a Marine Corps deuce-and-a-half with the driving seat six feet off the ground, and he felt about as far away from that experience as it was possible to get.
The map showed seven ways out of Pecos. He had come in on the southernmost, and it didn't have what he was looking for. So he had six to cover. His instinct led him west. The town's centre of gravity seemed to be lumped to the east of the crossroads, therefore east would be definitely wrong. So he drove away from the lawyers and the bondsmen in the direction of El Paso and followed a slight right-hand curve and found exactly what he wanted, all spread out in front of him and receding into the distance. Every town of any size has a strip of auto dealers clustered together on one of the approaches, and Pecos was no different.
He cruised up the strip and turned round and cruised back, looking for the right kind of place. There were two possibilities. Both of them had gaudy signs offering _Foreign Car Service_. Both of them offered _Free Loaners_. He chose the place farther out of town. It had a used car business in front with a dozen clunkers decked with flags and low prices on their windshields. An office in a trailer. Behind the sales lot was a long low shed with hydraulic hoists. The floor of the shed was oil-stained earth. There were four mechanics visible. One of them was halfway underneath a British sports car. The other three were unoccupied. A slow start to a hot Monday morning.
He drove the yellow VW right into the shed. The three unoccupied mechanics drifted over to it. One of them looked like a foreman. Reacher asked him to adjust the VW's clutch so its action would be softer. The guy looked happy to be offered the work. He said it would cost forty bucks. Reacher agreed the price and asked for a loaner. The guy led him behind the shed and pointed to an ancient Chrysler LeBaron convertible. It had been white once, but now it was khaki with age and sunlight. Reacher took Alice's gun with him, wrapped up in her maps like a store-bought package. He placed it on the Chrysler's passenger seat. Then he asked the mechanic for a tow rope.
'What you want to tow?' the guy asked.
'Nothing,' Reacher said. 'I just want the rope, is all.'
'You want a rope, but you don't want to tow anything?'
'You got it,' Reacher said.
The guy shrugged and walked away. Came back with a coil of rope. Reacher put it in the passenger footwell. Then he drove the LeBaron back into town and out again heading north and east, feeling a whole lot better about the day. Only a fool would try unlicensed debt-collecting in the wilds of Texas in a bright yellow car with New York plates and a bud vase on the dash.
He stopped once in empty country, to unscrew the Chrysler's plates with a penny from his pocket. He stored them on the floor on the passenger's side, next to the coil of rope. Put the bolts in the glove box. Then he drove on, looking for his destination. He was maybe three hours north of the Greer place, and the land looked pretty much the same, except it was better irrigated. Grass was growing. The mesquite had been burned back. There were cultivated acres, with green bushes all over them. Peppers, maybe. Or cantaloupe. He had no idea. There was wild indigo on the shoulders of the road. An occasional prickly pear. No people. The sun was high and the horizon was shimmering.
The rancher's name was listed on the legal paper as Lyndon J. Brewer. His address was just a route number which Alice's map showed was a stretch of road that ran about forty miles before it disappeared into New Mexico. It was the same sort of road as the drag heading south out of Echo down to the Greer place, a dusty blacktop ribbon and a string of drooping power lines punctuated by big ranch gates about every fifteen miles. The ranches had names, which weren't necessarily going to be the names of the owners, like the Red House had nowhere been labelled Greer. So finding Lyndon J. Brewer in person wasn't necessarily going to be easy.
But then it was, because the road was crossed by another and the resulting crossroads had a line of mailboxes laid out along a grey weathered plank and the mailboxes had people's names and ranch names on them together. _Brewer_ was painted freehand in black on a white box, and _Big Hat Ranch_ was painted right below it.
He found the entrance to the Big Hat Ranch fifteen miles to the north. There was a fancy iron arch, painted white, like something you might see holding up a conservatory roof in Charleston or New Orleans. He drove right past it and stopped on the shoulder of the road at the foot of the next power line pole. Got out of the car and looked straight up. There was a big transformer can at the top of the pole where the line split off in a T and ran away at a right angle toward where the ranch house must be. And, looping parallel all the way, about a foot lower down, the telephone line ran with it.
He took Alice's gun from under the maps on the passenger seat and the rope from the foot-well. Tied one end of the rope into the trigger guard with a single neat knot. Passed twenty feet of rope through his hands and swung the gun like a weight. Then he clamped the rope with his left hand and threw the gun with his right, aiming to slot it between the phone line and the electricity supply above it. The first time, he missed. The gun fell about a foot short and he caught it coming down. The second time he threw a little harder and hit it just right. The gun sailed through the gap and fell and snagged the rope over the wire. He played the rope out over his left palm and lowered the gun back down to himself. Untied it and tossed it back into the car and clamped the looped rope in both hands and pulled sharply. The phone line broke at the junction box and snaked down to the ground, all the way up to the next pole a hundred yards away.
He coiled the rope again and dropped it back in the footwell. Got in the car and backed up and turned in under the white-painted gate. Drove the best part of a mile down a private driveway to a white-painted house that should have been in a historical movie. It had four massive columns at the front, holding up a second storey balcony. There were broad steps leading up to a double front door. There was a tended lawn. A parking area made from raked gravel.
He stopped the car on the gravel at the bottom of the steps and shut off the motor. Tucked his shirt tight into the waistband of his pants. Some girl who worked as a personal trainer had told him it made his upper body look more triangular. He slipped the gun into his right hip pocket. Its shape showed through nicely. Then he rolled the sleeves of his new shirt all the way up to the shoulders. Gripped the LeBaron's wheel and squeezed until it started to give and the veins in his biceps were standing out big and obvious. When you've got arms bigger than most people's legs, sometimes you need to exploit what nature has given you.
He got out of the car and went up the steps. Used a bell pull he found to the right of the doors. Heard a chime somewhere deep inside the mansion. Then he waited. He was about to use the bell again when the left-hand door opened. There was a maid standing there, about half the height of the door. She was dressed in a grey uniform and looked like she came from the Philippines.
'I'm here to see Lyndon Brewer,' Reacher said.
'Do you have an appointment?' the maid said. Her English was very good.
'Yes, I do.'
'He didn't tell me.'
'He probably forgot,' Reacher said. 'I understand he's a bit of an asshole.'
Her face tensed. Not with shock. She was fighting a smile.
'Who shall I announce?'
'Rutherford B. Hayes,' Reacher said.
The maid paused and then smiled, finally.
'He was the nineteenth President,' she said. 'The one after Ulysses S. Grant. Born 1822 in Ohio. Served from 1877 until 1881. One of seven Presidents from Ohio. The middle one of three consecutive.'
'He's my ancestor,' Reacher said. 'I'm from Ohio, too. But I've got no interest in politics. Tell Mr Brewer I work for a bank in San Antonio and we just discovered stock in his grandfather's name worth about a million dollars.'
'He'll be excited about that,' the maid said.
She walked away and Reacher stepped through the door in time to see her climbing a wide staircase at the back of the entrance foyer. She moved neatly, without apparent effort, one hand on the rail all the way. The foyer was the size of a basketball court, and it was hushed and cool, panelled in golden hardwood polished to a deep lustre by generations of maids. There was a grandfather clock taller than Reacher, ticking softly to itself once a second. An antique chaise like you see society women perched on in oil-painted portraits. Reacher wondered if it would break in the middle if he put his weight on it. He pressed on the velvet with his hand. Felt horsehair padding under it. Then the maid came back down the stairs the same way she had gone up, gliding, her body perfectly still and her hand just grazing the rail.
'He'll see you now,' she said. 'He's on the balcony, at the back of the house.'
There was an upstairs foyer with the same dimensions and the same decor. French doors let out onto the rear balcony, which ran the whole width of the house and looked out over acres of hot grassland. It was roofed and fans turned lazily near the ceiling. There was heavy wicker furniture painted white and arranged in a group. A man sat in a chair with a small table at his right hand. The table held a pitcher and a glass filled with what looked like lemonade, but it could have been anything. The man was a bull-necked guy of about sixty. He was softened and faded from a peak that might have been impressive twenty years ago. He had plenty of white hair and a red face burned into lines and crags by the sun. He was dressed all in white. White pants, white shirt, white shoes. It looked like he was ready to go lawn bowling at some fancy country club.
'Mr Hayes?' he called.
Reacher walked over and sat down without waiting for an invitation.
'You got children?' he asked.
'I have three sons,' Brewer replied.
'Any of them at home?'
'They're all away, working.'
'Your wife?'
'She's in Houston, visiting.'
'So it's just you and the maid today?'
'Why do you ask?' He was impatient and puzzled, but polite, like people are when you're about to give them a million dollars.
'I'm a banker,' Reacher said. 'I have to ask.'
'Tell me about the stock,' Brewer said.
'There is no stock. I lied about that.'
Brewer looked surprised. Then disappointed. Then irritated.
'Then why are you here?' he asked.
'It's a technique we use,' Reacher said. 'I'm really a loan officer. A person needs to borrow money, maybe he doesn't want his domestic staff to know.'
'But I don't need to borrow money, Mr Hayes.'
'You sure about that?'
'Very.'
'That's not what we heard.'
'I'm a rich man. I lend. I don't borrow.'
'Really? We heard you had problems meeting your obligations.'
Brewer made the connection slowly. Shock travelled through his body to his face. He stiffened and grew redder and glanced down at the shape of the gun in Reacher's pocket, like he was seeing it for the first time. Then he put his hand down to the table and came back with a small silver bell. He shook it hard and it made a small tinkling sound.
'Maria!' he called, shaking the bell. 'Maria!'
The maid came out of the same door Reacher had used. She walked soundlessly along the boards of the balcony.
'Call the police,' Brewer ordered. 'Dial 911. I want this man arrested.'
She hesitated.
'Go ahead,' Reacher said. 'Make the call.'
She ducked past them and into the room directly behind Brewer's chair. It was some kind of a private study, dark and masculine. Reacher heard the sound of a phone being picked up. Then the sound of rapid clicking as she tried to make it work.
'The phones are out,' she called.
'Go wait downstairs,' Reacher called back.
'What do you want?' Brewer asked.
'I want you to meet your legal obligation.'
'You're not a banker.'
'That's a triumph of deduction.'
'So what are you?'
'A guy who wants a cheque,' Reacher said. 'For twenty thousand dollars.'
'You represent those . . . _people_?'
He started to stand up. Reacher put his arm out straight and shoved him back in his chair, hard enough to hurt.
'Sit still,' he said.
'Why are you doing this?'
'Because I'm a compassionate guy,' Reacher said. 'That's why. There's a family in trouble here. They're going to be upset and worried all winter long. Disaster staring them in the face. Never knowing which day is going to bring everything crashing down around them. I don't like to see people living that way, whoever they are.'
'They don't like it, they should get back to Mexico, where they belong.'
Reacher glanced at him, surprised. 'I'm not talking about _them_ ,' he said. 'I'm talking about _you_. Your family.'
'My family?'
Reacher nodded. 'I stay mad at you, they'll all suffer. A car wreck here, a mugging there. You might fall down the stairs, break your leg. Or your wife might. The house might set on fire. Lots of accidents, one after the other. You'll never know when the next one is coming. It'll drive you crazy.'
'You couldn't get away with it.'
'I'm getting away with it right now. I could start today. With you.'
Brewer said nothing.
'Give me that pitcher,' Reacher said.
Brewer hesitated a moment. Then he picked it up and held it out like an automaton. Reacher took it. It was fancy crystal with a cut pattern, maybe Waterford, maybe imported all the way from Ireland. It held a quart and probably cost a thousand bucks. He balanced it on his palm and sniffed its contents. Lemonade. Then he tossed it over the edge of the balcony. Yellow liquid arced out through the air and a second later there was a loud crash from the patio below.
'Oops,' he said.
'I'll have you arrested,' Brewer said. 'That's criminal damage.'
'Maybe I'll start with one of your sons,' Reacher said. 'Pick one out at random and throw him off the balcony, just like that.'
'I'll have you arrested,' Brewer said again.
'Why? According to you, what the legal system says doesn't matter. Or does that only apply to you? Maybe you think you're something special.'
Brewer said nothing. Reacher stood up and picked up his chair and threw it over the rail. It crashed and splintered on the stone below.
'Give me the cheque,' he said. 'You can afford it. You're a rich man. You just got through telling me.'
'It's a matter of principle,' Brewer said. 'They shouldn't be here.'
'And you should? Why? They were here first.'
'They lost. To us.'
'And now you're losing. To me. What goes around, comes around.'
He bent down and picked up the silver bell from the table. It was probably an antique. Maybe French. The cup part was engraved with filigree patterns. Maybe two and a half inches in diameter. He held it with his thumb on one side and all four fingers on the other. Squeezed hard and crushed it out of shape. Then he transferred it into his palm and squashed the metal flat. Leaned over and shoved it in Brewer's shirt pocket.
'I could do that to your head,' he said.
Brewer made no reply.
'Give me the cheque,' Reacher said, quietly. 'Before I lose my damn temper.'
Brewer paused. Five seconds. Ten. Then he sighed.
'OK,' he said. He led the way into the study and over to the desk. Reacher stood behind him. He didn't want any revolvers appearing suddenly out of drawers.
'Make it out to cash,' he said.
Brewer wrote the cheque. He got the date right, he got the amount right, and he signed it.
'It better not bounce,' Reacher said.
'It won't,' Brewer said.
'It does, you do, too. Off the patio.'
'I hope you rot in hell.'
Reacher folded the cheque into his pocket and found the way out to the upstairs foyer. Went down the stairs and walked over to the grandfather clock. Tilted it forward until it overbalanced. It fell like a tree and smashed on the floor and stopped ticking.
The two men exfiltrated after nearly three hours. The heat was too brutal to stay longer. And they didn't really need to. Nobody was going anywhere. That was clear. The old woman and her son stayed mostly in the house. The kid was hanging around in the barn, coming out now and then until the sun drove her back inside, once walking slowly back to the house when the maid called her to come and eat. So they gave it up and crawled north in the lee of the rocks and came out to wait on the dusty shoulder as soon as they were out of sight of the house. The woman in the Crown Vic turned up right on time. She had the air blasting and water in bottles. They drank the water and made their report.
'OK,' the woman said. 'So I guess we're ready to make our move.'
'I guess we are,' the dark man said.
'Sooner the better,' the fair man agreed. 'Let's get it done.'
Reacher put the plates back on the old LeBaron as soon as he was out of sight of the Brewer house. Then he drove straight back to Pecos and reclaimed Alice Aaron's VW from the mechanics. He paid them their forty bucks without complaint, but afterwards he wasn't really sure they'd done anything to the car. The clutch felt just as sharp as it had before. He stalled twice on the way back to the legal mission.
He left it in the lot behind the building with the maps and the handgun in the glove box where he had found them. Entered the old store from the front and found Alice at her desk in the back. She was on the phone and busy with clients. There was a whole family group in front of her. Three generations of quiet, anxious people. She had changed her clothes. Now she was wearing black high-waisted pants made out of some kind of thin cotton or linen, and a black jacket to match. The jacket made the white sports bra look like a shirt. The whole thing looked very formal. Instant attorney.
She saw him and put her hand over the phone and excused herself from her clients. She twisted away from them and he leaned down next to her.
'We've got big problems,' she said quietly. 'Hack Walker wants to see you.'
'Me?' he said. 'Why?'
'Better you hear it from him.'
'Hear what? Did you meet with him?'
She nodded. 'I went right over. We talked for a half-hour.'
'And? What did he say?'
'Better you hear it from him,' she said again. 'We can talk about it later, OK?'
There was worry in her voice. He looked at her. She turned back to the phone. The family in front of her desk leaned forward to catch her words. He took the twenty-thousand-dollar cheque out of his pocket and unfolded it and smoothed it on the desktop. She saw it and stopped talking. Put her hand over the phone again. Took a deep breath.
'Thanks,' she said.
Now there was embarrassment in her voice. Like maybe she had reconsidered her end of the bargain. He dropped her car keys on the desk and walked back out to the sidewalk. Turned right and headed for the courthouse.
The Pecos County District Attorney's office occupied the whole of the courthouse's second floor. There was an entry door from the stairwell that led to a narrow passage that passed through a wooden gate into an open area used as a secretarial pen. Beyond that were three doors leading into three offices, one for the DA and one for each of the assistants. All the interior walls separating the offices from the pen and from each other were glass from the waist up. They had old-fashioned venetian blinds covering the glass, with wide wooden slats and cotton tapes. The whole place looked cramped and out of date. There were air conditioners in every external window. They were all set on high and their motors put a deep booming tone into the structure of the walls.
The secretarial pen had two cluttered desks, both of them occupied, the farther one by a middle-aged woman who looked as if she belonged there, the nearer one by a young man who could have been an intern working his summer vacation from college. Clearly he doubled as the office receptionist, because he looked up with a bright _how-may-we-help-you_ expression on his face.
'Hack Walker wants to see me,' Reacher said.
'Mr Reacher?' the kid asked.
Reacher nodded and the kid pointed to the corner office.
'He's expecting you,' he said.
Reacher threaded his way through the cluttered space to the corner office. The door had a window with an acetate plaque below it. The plaque read _Henry F. W. Walker, District Attorney_. The window was covered on the inside by a closed blind. Reacher knocked once and went in without waiting for a reply.
The office had a window on each wall and a mess of filing cabinets and a big desk piled with paper and a computer and three telephones. Walker was in his chair behind it, leaning back, holding a photograph frame in both hands. It was a small wooden thing with a fibreboard tongue on the back that would prop it upright on a desk or a shelf. He was staring at the front of it. Some kind of serious distress on his face.
'What can I do for you?' Reacher asked.
Walker transferred his gaze from the photograph.
'Sit down,' he said. 'Please.'
The hearty politician's boom had gone from his voice. He sounded tired and ordinary. There was a client chair in front of the desk. Reacher picked it up and turned it sideways to give himself some legroom.
'What can I do for you?' he asked again.
'You ever had your life turned upside down overnight?'
Reacher nodded. 'Now and then.'
Walker propped the photograph on the desk, sideways, so it was visible to both of them. It was the same colour shot he had seen in Sloop Greer's closet. The three young men leaning on the old pick-up's fender, good friends, intoxicated with youth, on the cusp of infinite possibilities.
'Me and Sloop and Al Eugene,' he said. 'Now Al's a missing person and Sloop is dead.'
'No word on Eugene?'
Walker shook his head. 'Not a thing.'
Reacher said nothing.
'We were such a threesome,' Walker said. 'And you know how that goes. Isolated place like this, you get to be more than friends. It was us against the world.'
'Was Sloop his real name?'
Walker looked up. 'Why do you ask?'
'Because I thought yours was Hack. But I see from the sign on your door it's Henry.'
Walker nodded, and smiled a tired smile. 'It's Henry on my birth certificate. My folks call me Hank. Always did. But I couldn't say it as a youngster, when I was learning to talk. It came out _Hack_. It kind of stuck.'
'But Sloop was for real?'
Walked nodded again. 'It was Sloop Greer, plain and simple.'
'So what can I do for you?' Reacher asked for the third time.
'I don't know, really,' Walker said. 'Maybe just listen awhile, maybe clarify some things for me.'
'What kind of things?'
'I don't know, really,' Walker said again. 'Like, when you look at me, what do you see?'
'A district attorney.'
'And?'
'I'm not sure.'
Walker was quiet for a spell. 'You like what you see?' he asked.
Reacher shrugged. 'Less and less, to be honest.'
'Why?'
'Because I come in here and find you getting all misty-eyed over your boyhood friendship with a crooked lawyer and a wife-beater.'
Walker looked away. 'You certainly come straight to the point.'
'Life's too short not to.'
There was silence for a second. Just the dull roar of all the air conditioner motors, rising and falling as they slipped in and out of phase with each other.
'Actually I'm three things,' Walker said. 'I'm a man, I'm a DA, and I'm running for judge.'
'So?'
'Al Eugene isn't a crooked lawyer. Far from it. He's a good man. He's a campaigner. And he needs to be. Fact is, structurally, the state of Texas is not big on protecting the rights of the accused. The _indigent_ accused, even worse. You know that, because you had to find a lawyer for Carmen yourself, and that can only be because you were told she wouldn't get a court appointment for months. And the lawyer you found must have told you she's still looking at months and months of delay. It's a bad system, and I'm aware of it, and Al is aware of it. The Constitution guarantees access to counsel, and Al takes that promise very seriously. He makes himself available to anybody who can find his door. He gives them fair representation, whoever they are. Inevitably some of them are bad guys, but don't forget the Constitution applies to bad guys too. But most of his clients are OK. Most of them are just poor, is all, black or white or Hispanic.'
Reacher said nothing.
'So let me take a guess,' Walker said. 'I don't know where you heard Al called crooked, but a buck gets ten it was from an older white person with money or position.'
_It was Rusty Greer_ , Reacher thought.
'Don't tell me who,' Walker said. 'But ten gets a hundred I'm right. A person like that sees a lawyer sticking up for poor people or coloured people, and they regard it as a nuisance, or as an unpleasantness, and then as some kind of treachery against their race or their class, and from there on it's a pretty easy jump to calling it crooked.'
'OK,' Reacher said. 'Maybe I'm wrong about Eugene.'
'I guarantee you're wrong about him. guarantee you could go back to the very day he passed the bar exam and not find any crooked behaviour, anywhere at all.'
He placed his fingernail on the photograph, just below Al Eugene's chin.
'He's my friend,' he said. 'And I'm happy about that. As a man, and as a DA.'
'What about Sloop Greer?'
Walker nodded. 'We'll get to that. But first let me tell you about being a DA.'
'What's to tell?'
'Same kind of stuff. I'm like Al. I believe in the Constitution, and the rule of law, and impartiality, and fairness. I can absolutely guarantee you could turn this office upside down and never find one single case where I've been less than fair and impartial. I've been tough, sure, and I've sent lots of people to prison, and some of them to death row, but I've never done anything I wasn't absolutely convinced was right.'
'Sounds like a stump speech,' Reacher said. 'But I'm not registered to vote.'
'I know,' Walker said. 'I checked, finally. That's why I'm talking like this. If this was politics, it would be too hokey for words. But this is for real. I want to be a judge, because I could do some good. You familiar with how things work in Texas?'
'Not really.'
'Judges in Texas are all elected. They have a lot of power. And it's a weird state. A lot of rich people, but a lot of poor people too. The poor people need court-appointed lawyers, obviously. But there's no public defender system in Texas. So the judges choose the poor people's lawyers for them. They just pick them out, from any old law firm they want. They're in control of the whole process. They determine the fees, too. It's patronage, pure and simple. So who is the judge going to appoint? He's going to appoint somebody who contributed to his election campaign. It's about cronyism, not fitness or talent. The judge hands out ten thousand dollars of taxpayers' money to some favoured law firm, the law firm assigns some incompetent lackey who puts in a hundred dollars' worth of work, the net result being nine thousand nine hundred dollars unearned profit for the law firm and some poor guy in jail for something he maybe didn't do. Most defence lawyers meet their clients for the first time at the start of the trial, right there in the courtroom. We've had drunk lawyers and lawyers who fall asleep at the defence table. They don't do any work. They don't check anything. Like, the year before I got here, some guy was on trial for the rape of a child. He was convicted and went to prison for life. Then some pro-bono operation like you went to proved the guy had actually been in jail at the time the rape happened. In _jail_ , Reacher. Fifty miles away. Awaiting trial for stealing a car. There was paperwork from here to there, proving it beyond any doubt, all of it in black and white in the public record. His first lawyer never even checked.'
'Not too good,' Reacher said.
'So I do two things,' Walker said. 'First, I aim to become a judge, so I can help to put things right in the future. Second, right now, right here in the DA's office, we act out both sides. Every single time, one of us assembles the prosecution case, and another of us does the defence's work and tries to tear it down. We work real hard at it, because we know nobody else will, and I couldn't sleep nights if we didn't.'
'Carmen Greer's defence is rock solid,' Reacher said.
Hack Walker looked down at the desk.
'No, the Greer situation is a nightmare,' he said. 'It's a total disaster, all ways around. For me personally, as a man, as a DA, and as a candidate for a judgeship.'
'You have to recuse yourself.'
Walker looked up. 'Of course I'll recuse myself. No doubt about that. But it's still personal to me. And I'm still in overall charge. Whatever happens, it's still my _office_. And that'll have repercussions for me.'
'You want to tell me what your problem is?'
'Don't you see? Sloop was my friend. And I'm an honest prosecutor. So in my heart and in my head, I want to see justice done. But I'm looking at sending a Hispanic _woman_ to _death row_. I do that, I can forget about the election, can't I? This county is heavily Hispanic. But I want to be a judge. Because I could do some good. And asking for the death penalty against a minority woman _now_ will stop me dead. Not just here. It will be headline news _everywhere_. Can you imagine? What's the _New York Times_ going to say? They already think we're dumb redneck barbarians who marry our own cousins. It'll follow me the rest of my life.'
'So don't prosecute her. It wouldn't be justice, anyhow. Because it was self-defence, pure and simple.'
'She got you convinced of that?'
'It's obvious.'
'I wish it _was_ obvious. I'd give my right arm. For the first time in my career, I'd twist and turn to make this go away.'
Reacher stared at him. 'You don't need to twist and turn. Do you?'
'Let's talk it through,' Walker said. 'Step by step, right from the beginning. The spousal-abuse defence can work, but it has to be white-heat, spur-of-the-moment stuff. You understand? That's the law. There can't be premeditation. And Carmen premeditated like crazy. That's a fact, and it won't go away. She bought the gun more or less immediately she heard he was coming home. The paperwork comes through this office eventually, so I know that's true. She was ready and waiting to ambush him.'
Reacher said nothing.
'I know her,' Walker said. 'Obviously, I know her. Sloop was my friend, so I've known her as long as he did, near enough.'
'And?'
Walker shrugged, miserably. 'There are problems.'
'What problems?'
He shook his head. 'I don't know how much I should say, legitimately. So I'm just going to take a few guesses, OK? And I don't want you to respond at all. Not a word. It might put you in a difficult position.'
'Difficult how?'
'You'll see, later. She probably told you she comes from a rich wine-growing family north of San Francisco, right?'
Reacher said nothing.
'She told you she met Sloop at UCLA, where they were students together.'
Reacher said nothing.
'She told you Sloop got her pregnant and they had to get married and as a consequence her parents cut her off.'
Reacher said nothing.
'She told you Sloop hit her from the time she was pregnant. She said there were serious injuries that Sloop made her pass off as riding accidents.'
Reacher said nothing.
'She claimed it was her who tipped off the IRS, which made her all the more frantic about Sloop coming home.'
Reacher said nothing.
'OK,' Walker said. 'Now strictly speaking, anything she told you is merely hearsay and is inadmissible in court. Even though they were spontaneous statements that indicated how acute her anguish was. So in a situation like this, her lawyer will try hard to get the hearsay admitted, because it goes to her state of mind. And there _are_ provisions that might allow it. Obviously most DAs would fight it, but this office wouldn't. We'd tend to allow it, because we know marital abuse can be covert. My instinct would be to allow _anything_ that gets us nearer to the truth. So let's say you or a person like you were allowed to testify. You'd paint a pretty horrible picture, and in the circumstances, what with his return home looming over her and all, the jury might tend to be sympathetic. They might overlook the element of premeditation. She might get a not guilty verdict.'
'So where's the problem?'
'Problem is, if you testified, you'd be cross-examined too.'
'So?'
Walker looked down at the desk again. 'Let me take a couple more guesses. Don't respond. And please, if I'm guessing wrong, don't be offended. If I'm wrong, I apologize most sincerely in advance. OK?'
'OK.'
'My guess is the premeditation was extensive. My guess is she thought about it and then she tried to recruit you to do it for her.'
Reacher said nothing.
'My guess is she didn't pick you up by accident. She selected you in some way and tried hard to persuade you.'
Reacher said nothing. Walker swallowed.
'Another guess,' he said. 'She offered you sex as a bribe.'
Reacher said nothing.
'Another guess,' Walker said. 'She didn't give up. At some stage, she tried again to get you into bed.'
Reacher said nothing.
'You see?' Walker said. 'If I'm right, and I think I am, because I _know_ this woman, all that stuff would come out too, under cross-examination. Evidence of thorough preparation. Unless you were to lie on the stand. Or unless we didn't ask the right questions. But assuming we asked the right questions and you told us the truth, the whole premeditation issue would be damaged. Very seriously. Probably fatally.'
Reacher said nothing.
'And it gets worse, I'm afraid,' Walker said. 'Much worse. Because if she's told you things, what matters then is her _credibility_ , right? Specifically, was she telling you the truth about the abuse, or was she not? We'd test that by asking you questions we _do_ know the answers to. So under cross-examination, we'd ask you innocent stuff first, like who she is and where she's from, and you'd tell us what she told you.'
'And?'
'And her credibility would fall apart. Next stop, death by lethal injection.'
'Why?'
'Because I _know_ this woman, and she makes things up.'
'What things?'
'Everything. I've heard her stories, over and over. Did she in fact tell you she's from a rich wine-growing family?'
Reacher nodded. 'More or less. She said she's from a thousand acres in the Napa Valley. Isn't she?'
Walker shook his head. 'She's from some barrio in South Central LA. Nobody knows anything about her parents. She probably doesn't, either.'
Reacher was quiet for a moment. Then he shrugged. 'Disguising a humble background isn't a crime.'
'She was never a student at UCLA. She was a stripper. She was a whore, Reacher. She serviced the UCLA frat parties, among other things. Sloop met her when she was performing. Part of her repertoire was an interesting little trick with a long-neck beer bottle. He fell for her, somehow. You know, _let me take you away from all this_ sort of thing. I guess I can understand it. She's cute now. She was stunning then. And smart. She looked at Sloop and saw a rich man's son from Texas with a big fat wallet. She saw a meal ticket. She went to live with him. Came off the pill and lied about it and got herself pregnant. Whereupon Sloop did the decent thing, because he was like that, in a gentlemanly way. She suckered him, and he let her.'
'I don't believe you.'
Walker shrugged. 'Doesn't matter if you do or if you don't, and I'll tell you exactly why in a moment. But it's all true, I'm afraid. She had brains. She knew what happens to whores when they get old. It goes right downhill, and it doesn't start very high, does it? She wanted a way out, and Sloop was it. She bled him for years, diamonds, horses, everything.'
'I don't believe you,' Reacher said again.
Walker nodded. 'She's very convincing. Can't argue with that.'
'Even if it _is_ true, does it justify him hitting her?'
Walker paused a beat. 'No, of course not,' he said. 'But here's the big problem. The thing is, he didn't hit her. Never, Reacher. He wasn't violent with her. Not ever. I _knew_ Sloop. He was a lot of things, and to be absolutely honest about it, not all of them were good. He was lazy, he was a little casual in business. A little dishonest, to be truthful. I'm not wearing rose-coloured spectacles. But all his faults came from the feeling he was a Texan gentleman. I'm very aware of that, because I was a poor boy by comparison. Practically trash. He had the big ranch and the money. It made him a little arrogant and superior, hence the laziness and the impatience with strict principle. But part of being a gentleman in Texas is you would _never, ever_ hit a woman. Whoever the woman was. Not ever. So, she's making all that up, too. I know it. He never hit her. I promise you that.'
Reacher shook his head. 'What _you_ promise me doesn't prove a damn thing. I mean, what else would you say? You were his friend.'
Walker nodded again. 'I take your point. But there's nothing else to go on. There's just nothing there. Absolutely no evidence, no witnesses, no nothing. We were close. I was with them a thousand times. I heard about the horseback riding accidents as they happened. There weren't _that_ many, and they seemed genuine. We'll ask for the medical records, of course, but I don't hold out much hope they'll be ambiguous.'
'You said it yourself, abuse can be covert.'
' _That_ covert? I'm a DA, Reacher. I've seen everything. Some lone couple in a trailer park, maybe. But Sloop and Carmen lived with family, and they saw friends every day. And before you told the story to Alice Aaron, nobody in the whole of Texas had ever heard the faintest whiff of a rumour about violence between them. Not me, not Al, nobody. So do you understand what I mean? There's no evidence. All we've got is her word. And you're the _only other person_ who ever heard it. But if you take the stand to back her up, then her trial is over before it's begun, because the _other_ stuff you'll have to say will prove she's a pathological liar. Like, _did_ she say she'd tipped off the IRS?'
'Yes, she did. She said she called them. Some special unit.'
Walker shook his head. 'They caught him through bank records. It was just a purely accidental by-product of an audit on somebody else. She knew nothing about it. I know that _for sure_ , for an absolute fact, because Sloop went straight to Al Eugene and Al came straight to me for advice. I saw the indictment. Black and white. Carmen is a liar, Reacher, pure and simple. Or maybe not pure and simple. Maybe there are some very complicated reasons behind it.'
Reacher paused a long moment. 'Maybe she is a liar,' he said. 'But liars can still get abused, same as anybody else. And abuse can be covert. You don't _know_ it wasn't happening.'
Walker nodded. 'I agree. I don't _know_. But I would bet my life it wasn't.'
'She convinced me.'
'She probably convinced herself. She lives in a fantasy world. I _know_ her, Reacher. She's a liar, is all, and she's guilty of first-degree homicide.'
'So why are we talking?'
Walker paused. 'Can I trust you?' he asked.
'Does it matter?' Reacher said.
Walker went very quiet. Just stared at his office wall, a whole minute, then another. And another. The boom of the air conditioners crowded into the silence.
'Yes, it matters,' he said. 'It matters plenty. To Carmen, and to me. Because right now you're reading me completely wrong. I'm not an angry friend trying to protect my old buddy's reputation. Fact is, I _want_ to find a defence for Carmen, don't you see that? Even _invent_ one. You know, maybe just _pretend_ the abuse happened and back-pedal like crazy on the premeditation. I'm seriously tempted. Because then I don't need to charge her at all and I can probably save my shot at the judgeship.'
The silence came back. Nothing but the air conditioner motors and telephones ringing faintly outside the office door. The distant chatter of a fax machine.
'I want to go see her,' Reacher said.
Walker shook his head. 'Can't let you. You're not her lawyer.'
'You could bend the rules.'
Walker sighed again and dropped his head into his hands. 'Please, don't tempt me. Right now I'm thinking about throwing the rules off the top of the building.'
Reacher said nothing. Walker stared into space, his eyes jumping with strain.
'I want to figure out her real motive,' he said finally. 'Because if it was something real cold, like money, I don't have a choice. She has to go down.'
Reacher said nothing.
'But if it wasn't, I want you to help me,' Walker said. 'If her medical records are remotely plausible, I want to try to save her with the abuse thing.'
Reacher said nothing.
'OK, what I really mean is I want to try to save myself,' Walker said. 'Try to save my chances in the election. Or both things, OK? Her _and_ me. Ellie, too. She's a great kid. Sloop loved her.'
'So what would you want from me?'
'If we go down that road.'
Reacher nodded. 'If,' he said.
'I'd want you to lie on the stand,' Walker said. 'I'd want you to repeat what she told you about the beatings, and modify what she told you about everything else, in order to preserve her credibility.'
Reacher said nothing.
'That's why I need to trust you,' Walker said. 'And that's why I needed to lay everything out for you. So you know exactly what you're getting into with her.'
'I've never done that sort of a thing before.'
'Neither have I,' Walker said. 'It's killing me just to talk about it.'
Reacher was quiet for a long moment.
'Why do you assume I'd want to?' he asked.
'I think you like her,' Walker said. 'I think you feel sorry for her. I think you want to help her. Therefore indirectly you could help me.'
'How would you work it?'
Walker shrugged. 'I'll be withdrawn from the case from the start, so one of my assistants will be handling it. I'll find out exactly what she can prove for sure, and I'll coach you on it so you don't get tripped up. That's why I can't let you go see Carmen now. They keep a record downstairs. It would look like prior collusion.'
'I don't know,' Reacher said.
'I don't, either. But maybe it won't have to go all the way to trial. If the medical evidence is a little flexible, and we take a deposition from Carmen, and one from you, then maybe dropping the charges altogether would be justified.'
'Lying in a deposition would be just as bad.'
'Think about Ellie.'
'And your judgeship.'
Walker nodded. 'I'm not hiding that from you. I want to get elected, no doubt about it. But it's for an honest reason. I want to make things better, Reacher. It's always been my ambition. Work my way up, improve things from the inside. It's the only way. For a person like me, anyway. I've got no influence as a lobbyist. I'm not a politician, really. I find all that stuff embarrassing. I don't have the skills.'
Reacher said nothing.
'Let me think it over,' Walker said. 'A day or two. I'll take it from there.'
'You sure?'
Walker sighed again. 'No, of course I'm not _sure_. I hate this whole thing. But what the hell, Sloop's dead. Nothing's going to change that. Nothing's going to bring him back. It'll trash his memory, of course. But it would save Carmen. And he loved her, Reacher. In a way nobody else could ever understand. The disapproval he brought down on himself was unbelievable. From his family, from polite society. He'd be happy to exchange his reputation for her life, I think. _His_ life for _her_ life, effectively. He'd exchange mine, or Al's, or anybody's, probably. He loved her.'
There was silence again.
'She needs bail,' Reacher said.
'Please,' Walker said. 'It's out of the question.'
'Ellie needs her.'
'That's a bigger issue than bail,' Walker said. 'Ellie can stand a couple of days with her grandmother. It's the rest of her life we need to worry about. Give me time to work this out.'
Reacher shrugged and stood up.
'This is all in strict confidence, right?' Walker said. 'I guess I should have made that clear right from the start.'
Reacher nodded. 'Get back to me,' he said.
Then he turned round and walked out of the room.
TWELVE
'One simple question,' Alice said. 'Is it plausible domestic abuse could be so covert that close friends are totally unaware of it?'
'I don't know,' Reacher said. 'I don't have much experience.'
'Neither do I.'
They were on opposite sides of Alice's desk in the back of the legal mission. It was the middle of the day, and the heat was so brutal it was enforcing a _de facto_ siesta on the whole town. Nobody was out and about who didn't desperately need to be. The mission was largely deserted. Just Alice and Reacher and one other lawyer twenty feet away. The inside temperature was easily over a hundred and ten degrees. The humidity was rising. The ancient air conditioner above the door was making no difference at all. Alice had changed into shorts again. She was leaning back in her chair, arms above her head, her back arched off the sticky vinyl. She was slick with sweat from head to foot. Over the tan it made her skin look oiled. Reacher's shirt was soaked. He was reconsidering its projected three-day lifespan.
'It's a Catch-22,' Alice said. 'Abuse you _know_ about isn't covert. _Really_ covert abuse, you might assume it isn't happening. Like, I assume my dad isn't beating my mom. But maybe he is. Who would know? What about yours?'
Reacher smiled. 'I doubt it. He was a US Marine. Big guy, not especially genteel. But then, you should have seen my mother. Maybe she was beating _him_.'
'So yes or no about Carmen and Sloop?'
'She convinced me,' Reacher said. 'No doubt about it.'
'Despite everything?'
'She convinced me,' he said again. 'Maybe she's all kinds of a liar about other things, but he was beating her. That's my belief.'
Alice looked at him, a lawyer's question in her eyes.
'No doubt at all?' she asked.
'No doubt at all,' he said.
'OK, but a difficult case just got a lot harder. And I hate it when that happens.'
'Me too,' he said. 'But hard is not the same thing as impossible.'
'You understand the exact legalities here?'
He nodded. 'It's not rocket science. She's in deep shit, whichever way you cut it. If there _was_ abuse, she's blown it anyway by being so premeditated. If there _wasn't_ , then it's murder one, pure and simple. And whatever, she has zero credibility because she lies and exaggerates. Ballgame over, if Walker didn't want to be judge so bad.'
'Exactly,' Alice said.
'You happy about riding that kind of luck?'
'No.'
'Neither am I.'
'Not morally, not practically,' Alice said. 'Anything could happen here. Maybe Hack's got a love child somewhere, and it'll come out and he'll have to withdraw anyway. Maybe he likes to have sex with armadillos. It's a long time until November. Counting on him to stay electable no matter what would be foolish. So his tactical problem with Carmen could disappear at any time. So she needs a properly structured defence.'
Reacher smiled again. 'You're even smarter than I figured.'
'I thought you were going to say than I _looked_.'
'I think more lawyers should dress that way.'
'You need to stay off the stand,' she said. 'Much safer for her. No deposition, either. Without you, the gun is the only thing that suggests premeditation. And we should be able to argue that _buying_ the gun and actually _using_ it weren't necessarily closely connected. Maybe she bought it for another reason.'
Reacher said nothing.
'They're testing it now,' she said. 'Over at the lab. Ballistics and fingerprints. Two sets of prints, they say. Hers, I guess, maybe his too. Maybe they struggled over it. Maybe the whole thing was an accident.'
Reacher shook his head. 'The second set must be mine. She asked me to teach her how to shoot. We went up on the mesa and practised.'
'When?'
'Saturday. The day before he got home.'
She stared at him. 'Christ, Reacher,' she said. 'You _definitely_ stay off the stand, OK?'
'I plan to.'
'What about if things change and they subpoena you?'
'Then I'll lie, I guess.'
'Can you?'
'I was a cop of sorts for thirteen years. It wouldn't be a totally radical concept.'
'What would you say about your prints on the gun?'
'I'd say I found it dumped somewhere. Innocently gave it back to her. Make it look like she had reconsidered after buying it.'
'You comfortable with saying stuff like that?'
'If the ends justify the means, I am. And I think they do here. She's given herself a problem proving it, is all. You?'
She nodded. 'A case like this, I guess so. I don't care about the lies about her background. People do stuff like that, all the time, all kinds of reasons. So all that's left is the premeditation thing. And most other states, premeditation wouldn't be an issue. They recognize the reality. A battered woman can't necessarily be effective on the spur of the moment. Sometimes she needs to wait until he's drunk, or asleep. You know, bide her time. There are lots of cases like that in other jurisdictions.'
'So where do we start?'
'Where we're forced to,' Alice said. 'Which is a pretty bad place. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. _Res ipsa loquitur_ , they call it. The thing speaks for itself. Her bedroom, her gun, her husband lying there dead on the floor. That's murder one. We leave it like that, they'll convict her on the first vote.'
'So?'
'So we back-pedal on the premeditation and then we prove the abuse through the medical records. I've already started the paperwork. We joined with the DA's office for a common-cause subpoena. All Texas hospitals, and all neighbouring states. Domestic violence, that's standard procedure, because people sometimes drive all over to hide it. The hospitals generally react pretty fast, so we should get the records overnight. Then it's _res ipsa loquitur_ again. If the injuries _were_ caused by violence, then the records will at least show they _could have_ been. That's just common sense. Then she takes the stand and she talks about the abuse. She'll have to take it on the chin over the bullshit stories about her past. But if we present it right, she could even look quite good. No shame in being an ex-hooker trying to reform. We could build up some sympathy there.'
'You sound like a pretty good lawyer.'
She smiled. 'For one so young?'
'Well, what are you, two years out of school?'
'Six months,' she said. 'But you learn fast down here.'
'Evidently.'
'Whatever, with careful jury selection, we'll get at least half and half don't-knows and not-guiltys. The not-guiltys will wear down the don't-knows within a couple of days. Especially if it's this hot.'
Reacher pulled the soaked fabric of his shirt off his skin. 'Can't stay this hot much longer, can it?'
'Hey, I'm talking about _next_ summer,' Alice said. 'That's if she's lucky. Could be the summer after that.'
He stared at her. 'You're kidding.'
She shook her head. 'The record around here is four years in jail between arrest and trial.'
'What about Ellie?'
She shrugged. 'Just pray the medical records look real good. If they do, we've got a shot at getting Hack to drop the charges altogether. He's got a lot of latitude.'
'He wouldn't need much pushing,' Reacher said. 'The mood he's in.'
'So look on the bright side. This whole thing could be over in a couple of days.'
'When are you going to go see her?'
'Later this afternoon. First I'm going to the bank to cash a twenty-thousand-dollar cheque. Then I'm going to put the money in a grocery bag and drive out and deliver it to some very happy people.'
'OK,' Reacher said.
'I don't want to know what you did to get it.'
'I just asked for it.'
'I don't want to know,' she said again. 'But you should come with me and meet them. And be my bodyguard. Not every day I carry twenty thousand dollars around the Wild West in a grocery bag. And it'll be cool in the car.'
'OK,' Reacher said again.
The bank showed no particular excitement about forking over twenty grand in mixed bills. The teller treated it like a completely routine part of her day. She just counted the money three times and stacked it carefully in a brown-paper grocery bag Alice provided for the purpose. Reacher carried it back to the parking lot for her. But she didn't need him to. There was no danger of getting mugged. The fearsome heat had just about cleared the streets, and what few people remained were moving slowly and listlessly.
The interior of the VW had heated up to the point where they couldn't get in right away. Alice started the air going and left the doors open until the blowers took thirty degrees off it. It was probably still over a hundred when they slid inside. But it felt cool. All things are relative. Alice drove, heading north and east. She was good. Better than him. She didn't stall a single time.
'There'll be a storm,' she said.
'Everybody tells me that,' he said. 'But I don't see it coming.'
'You ever felt heat like this before?'
'Maybe,' he said. 'Once or twice. Saudi Arabia, the Pacific. But Saudi is drier and the Pacific is wetter. So, not exactly.'
The sky ahead of them was light blue, so hot it looked white. The sun was a diffuse glare, like it was located everywhere. There was no cloud at all. He was squinting so much the muscles in his face were hurting.
'It's new to me,' she said. 'That's for sure. I figured it would be hot here, but this is completely unbelievable.'
Then she asked him when he'd been in the Middle East and the Pacific islands, and he responded with the expanded ten-minute version of his autobiography because he found he was enjoying her company. The first thirty-six years were easy enough, as always. They made a nicely linear tale of childhood and adulthood, accomplishment and progress, punctuated and underlined in the military fashion with promotions and medals. The last few years were harder, as usual. The aimlessness, the drifting. He saw them as a triumph of disengagement, but he knew other people didn't. So as always he just told the story and answered the awkward questions and let her think whatever she wanted.
Then she responded in turn with an autobiography of her own. It was more or less the same as his, in an oblique way. He was the son of a soldier, she was the daughter of a lawyer. She had never really considered straying away from the family trade, just like he hadn't. All her life she had seen people talk the talk and walk the walk and then she had set about following after them, just like he had. She spent seven years at Harvard where he spent four at West Point. Now she was twenty-five and the rough equivalent of an ambitious lieutenant in the law business. He had been an ambitious lieutenant at twenty-five, too, and he could remember exactly how it felt.
'So what's next?' he asked.
'After this?' she said. 'Back to New York, I guess. Maybe Washington DC. I'm getting interested in policy.'
'You won't miss this down-and-dirty stuff?'
'I will, probably. And I won't give it up completely. Maybe I'll volunteer a few weeks a year. Certainly I'll try to fund it. That's where all our money comes from, you know. Big firms in the big cities, with a conscience.'
'I'm glad to hear it. Somebody needs to do something.'
'That's for sure.'
'What about Hack Walker?' he asked. 'Will he make a difference?'
She shrugged at the wheel. 'I don't know him very well. But his reputation is good. And he can't make things any worse, can he? It's a really screwed-up system. I mean, I'm a democrat, big D _and_ little d, so theoretically to elect your judges is perfectly fine with me. Theoretically. But in practice, it's totally out of hand. I mean, what does it cost to run a campaign down here?'
'No idea.'
'Well, figure it out. We're talking about Pecos County, basically, because that's where the bulk of the electorate is. A bunch of posters, some newspaper ads, half a dozen home-made commercials on the local TV channels. A market like this, you'd have to work really hard to spend more than five figures. But these guys are all picking up contributions running to hundreds and hundreds and _hundreds_ of thousands of dollars. Millions, maybe. And the law says if you don't get around to spending it, you don't have to give it back. You just keep it, for miscellaneous future expenses. So what it amounts to is they're all picking up their bribes in advance. The law firms and the oil people and the special interests are paying _now_ for future help. You can get seriously rich, running for judge in Texas. And if you get elected and do the right things all your years on the bench, you retire straight into some big law partnership and you get asked onto the boards of a half-dozen big companies. So it's not really about trying to get elected a _judge_. It's about trying to get elected a _prince_. Like turning into royalty overnight.'
'So will Walker make a difference?' he asked again.
'He will if he wants to. Simple as that. And right now, he'll make a difference to Carmen Greer. That's what we need to focus on.'
He nodded. She slowed the car, hunting a turn. They were back up in ranch country. Somewhere near the Brewer place, he guessed, although he didn't recognize any specific features of the landscape. It was laid out in front of him, so dry and so hot it seemed the parched vegetation could burst into flames at any moment.
'Does it bother you she told all those lies?' Alice asked.
He shrugged. 'Yes and no. Nobody likes to be lied to, I guess. But look at it from her point of view. She reached the conclusion he had to be gotten rid of, so she set about achieving it.'
'So there _was_ extensive premeditation?'
'Should I be telling you this?'
'I'm on her side.'
He nodded. 'She had it all planned. She said she looked at a hundred guys and sounded out a dozen before she picked on me.'
Alice nodded back. 'Actually that makes me feel better somehow, you know? Kind of proves how bad it was. Surely _nobody_ would do that without some kind of really urgent necessity.'
'Me too,' he said. 'I feel the same way.'
She slowed again and turned the car onto a farm track. After ten yards the track passed under a poor imitation of the older ranch gates he had seen elsewhere. It was just a rectangle of unpainted two-by-fours nailed together, leaning slightly to the left. The crossbar had a name written on it. It was indecipherable, scorched and faded to nothing by the sun. Beyond it were a few acres of cultivated ground. There were straight rows of turned dirt and an irrigation system pieced together from improvised parts. There were piles of fieldstone here and there. Neat wooden frames to carry wires to support the bushes that no longer grew. Everything was dry and crisp and fallow. The whole picture spoke of agonizing months of back-breaking manual labour in the fearsome heat, followed by tragic disappointment.
There was a house a hundred yards beyond the last row of turned earth. It wasn't a bad place. It was small and low, wood-framed, painted dull white with a finish that had cracked and crazed in the sun. There was a windmill behind it. There was a barn, with an irrigation pump venting through the roof and a damaged three-quarter-ton truck standing idle. The house had a closed front door. Alice parked the VW right next to it.
'They're called García,' she said. 'I'm sure they're home.'
Twenty thousand dollars in a grocery bag had an effect like he'd never seen before. It was literally a gift of life. There were five Garcías, two generations, two in the older and three in the younger. They were all small and scrappy people. The parents were maybe in their late forties and the eldest child was a girl of maybe twenty-four. The younger offspring were both boys and could have been twenty-two and twenty. They all stood quietly together inside the doorway. Alice said a bright hello and walked straight past them and spilled the money on their kitchen table.
'He changed his mind,' she said, in Spanish. 'He decided to pay up, after all.'
The Garcías formed a semicircle around the table, silent, looking at the money, like it represented such a stunning reversal of fortune that no reaction was possible. They didn't ask any questions. Just accepted it had finally happened and then paused a second and burst out with a long list of plans. First, they would get the telephone reconnected so they wouldn't have to walk eight miles to their neighbour's place. Then the electricity. Then they would pay back what they had borrowed from friends. Then they would buy diesel fuel, so the irrigation pump could run again. Then they would get their truck fixed and drive it to town for seed and fertilizer. They went quiet again when it dawned on them they could get a whole crop grown and harvested and sold before the winter came.
Reacher hung back and looked around the room. It was an eat-in, live-in kitchen, opening to a front parlour. The parlour was hot and airless and had a yard-long encyclopedia set and a bunch of religious statuettes on a low shelf. A single picture on the wall. The picture was a photograph of a boy. It was a studio portrait. The boy was maybe fourteen, with a precocious smudge of moustache above his lip. He was wearing a white confirmation robe and smiling shyly. The picture was in a black frame and had a dusty square of black fabric hung around it.
'My eldest son,' a voice said. 'That picture was made just before we left our village in Mexico.'
Reacher turned and found the mother standing behind him.
'He was killed, on the journey here,' she said.
Reacher nodded. 'I know. I heard. The Border Patrol. I'm very sorry.'
'It was twelve years ago. His name was Raoul García.'
The way she said his name was like a small act of remembrance.
'What happened?' Reacher asked.
The woman was silent for a second. 'It was awful,' she said. 'They hunted us for three hours in the night. We were walking and running, they had a truck with bright lights. We got split up. Divided, in the dark. Raoul was with his sister. He was protecting her. She was twelve. He sent her one way and walked the other way, into the lights. He knew it was worse if they captured girls. He gave himself up to save his sister. But they didn't try to arrest him or anything. Didn't even ask him any questions. They just shot him down and drove away. They came near where I was hiding. They were laughing. I heard them. Like it was a sport.'
'I'm very sorry,' Reacher said again.
The woman shrugged. 'It was very common then. It was a bad time, and a bad area. We found that out, later. Either our guide didn't know, or didn't care. We found out that there were more than twenty people killed on that route in a year. For fun. Some of them in horrible ways. Raoul was lucky, just to be shot. Some of them, their screams could be heard for miles, across the desert, in the darkness. Some of the girls were carried away and never seen again.'
Reacher said nothing. The woman gazed at the picture for a moment longer. Then she turned away with an immense physical effort and forced a smile and gestured that Reacher should rejoin the party in the kitchen.
'We have tequila,' she said quietly. 'Saved especially for this day.'
There were shot glasses on the table, and the daughter was filling them from a bottle. The girl that Raoul had saved, all grown up. The younger son passed the glasses around. Reacher took his and waited. The García father motioned for quiet and raised his drink toward Alice in a toast.
'To our lawyer,' he said. 'For proving the great Frenchman Honoré de Balzac wrong when he wrote, "Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught." '
Alice blushed a little. García smiled at her and turned to Reacher. 'And to you, sir, for your generous assistance in our time of need.'
' _De nada_ ,' Reacher said. ' _No hay de qué_.'
The tequila was rough and Raoul's memory was everywhere, so they refused a second shot and left the Garcías alone with their celebrations. They had to wait again until the air conditioner made the VW's interior bearable. Then they headed back to Pecos.
'I enjoyed that,' Alice said. 'Felt like I finally made a difference.'
'You did make a difference.'
'Even though it was you made it happen.'
'You did the skilled labour,' he said.
'Nevertheless, thanks.'
'Did the Border Patrol ever get investigated?' he asked.
She nodded. 'Thoroughly, according to the record. There was enough noise made. Nothing specific, of course, but enough general rumours to make it inevitable.'
'And?'
'And nothing. It was a whitewash. Nobody was even indicted.'
'But did it stop?'
She nodded again. 'As suddenly as it started. So obviously they got the message.'
'That's how it works,' he said. 'I've seen it before, different places, different situations. The investigation isn't really an investigation, as such. It's more like a message. Like a coded warning. Like saying, you can't get away with this any more, so you better stop doing it, whoever you are.'
'But justice wasn't done, Reacher. Twenty-some people died. Some of them gruesomely. It was like a pogrom, a year long. Somebody should have paid.'
'Did you recognize that Balzac quotation?' he asked.
'Sure,' she said. 'I went to Harvard, after all.'
'Remember Herbert Marcuse, too?'
'He was later, right? A philosopher, not a novelist.'
He nodded. 'Born ninety-nine years after Balzac. A social and political philosopher. He said, ' "Law and order are everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy." '
'That stinks.'
'Of course it does,' he said. 'But that's the way it is.'
They made it back to Pecos inside an hour. She parked on the street right outside the legal mission so they only had to walk ten feet through the heat. But ten feet was enough. It was like walking ten feet through a blast furnace with a hot towel wrapped around your head. They made it inside and found Alice's desk covered in little handwritten notes stuck randomly to its surface. She peeled them off and scooped them up and read them through, one by one. Then she dropped them all in a drawer.
'I'm going to check in with Carmen at the jail,' she said. 'But the prints and the ballistics are back from the lab. Hack Walker wants to see you about them. Sounds like he's got a problem.'
'I'm sure he has,' Reacher said.
They walked to the door and paused a second before braving the sidewalk again. Then they split up in front of the courthouse. Alice walked on toward the jailhouse entrance and Reacher went up the front steps and inside. The public areas and the staircase had no air conditioning. Making it up just one floor soaked him in sweat. The intern at the desk pointed silently to Hack Walker's door. Reacher went straight in and found Walker studying a technical report. He had the look of a man who thinks if he reads a thing often enough, maybe it will change what it says.
'She killed him,' he said. 'Everything matches. The ballistics are perfect.'
Reacher sat down in front of the desk.
'Your prints were on the gun, too,' Walker said.
Reacher made no reply. If he was going to lie, he was going to save it for when it would count for something.
'You're in the national fingerprint database,' Walker said. 'You know that?'
Reacher nodded. 'All military personnel are.'
'So maybe you found the gun discarded,' Walker said. 'Maybe you handled it because you were worried about a family with a kid having a stray firearm around. Maybe you picked it up and put it away in a place of safety.'
'Maybe,' Reacher said.
Walker turned a page in the file.
'But it's worse than that, isn't it?' he said.
'Is it?'
'You a praying man?'
'No,' Reacher said.
'You damn well should be. You should get on your knees and thank somebody.'
'Like who?'
'Maybe the State cops. Maybe old Sloop himself for calling the sheriff.'
'Why?'
'Because they just saved your life.'
'How?'
'Because you were on the road in a squad car when this went down. If they'd left you in the bunkhouse, you'd be our number-one suspect.'
'Why?'
Walker turned another page.
'Your prints were on the gun,' he said again. ' _And_ on every one of the shell cases. _And_ on the magazine. _And_ on the ammunition box. You loaded that gun, Reacher. Probably test-fired it too, they think, then reloaded it ready for action. She bought it, so it was technically _her_ possession, but it looks from the fingerprint evidence that it was effectively _your_ weapon.'
Reacher said nothing.
'So you see?' Walker asked. 'You should set up a little shrine to the State Police and give thanks every morning you wake up alive and free. Because the obvious thing for me to do would be come right after _you_. You could have crept up from the bunkhouse to the bedroom, easy as anything. Because you knew where the bedroom was, didn't you? I talked to Bobby. He told me you spent the previous night in there. Did you really think he'd just sit quiet in the barn? He probably watched you two going at it, through the window.'
'I didn't sleep with her,' Reacher said. 'I was on the sofa.'
Walker smiled. 'Think a jury would believe you? Or an ex-whore? I don't. So we could easily prove some kind of a sexual jealousy motive. The next night you could have crept up there and got the gun out of the drawer and shot Sloop dead, and then crept back again. Only you couldn't have, because you were in the back of a police car at the time. So you're a lucky man, Reacher. Because right now a white male shooter would be worth his weight in gold to me. You could go integrate death row single-handed. A big WASP like you, in among all the blacks and the Hispanics, I'd look like the fairest prosecutor in Texas. The election would be over before it started.'
Reacher said nothing. Walker sighed.
'But you didn't do it, unfortunately,' he said. 'She did it. So _now_ what have I got? The premeditation thing is going from bad to worse. It's just about shot to hell now. Clearly she thought, and she thought, even to the extent of hooking up with some ex-Army guy to give her weapons training. We got your record, after we got your prints. You were a pistol-shooting champ two straight years. You did a spell as an instructor, for Christ's sake. You loaded her gun for her. What the hell am I going to do?'
'What you planned,' Reacher said. 'Wait for the medical reports.'
Walker went quiet. Then he sighed again. Then he nodded.
'We'll have them tomorrow,' he said. 'And you know what I did? I hired a defence expert to take a look at them. You know there are experts who only appear for the defence? Normally we wouldn't go near them. Normally we want to know how _much_ we can get out of a thing, not how little. But I hired a defence guy, the exact same guy Alice Aaron would hire if she could afford him. Because I want somebody who can persuade me there's a faint possibility Carmen's telling the truth, so I can let her go without looking like I'm crazy.'
'So relax,' Reacher said. 'It'll be over tomorrow.'
'I hope so,' Walker said. 'And it might be. Al Eugene's office is sending over some financial stuff. Al did all that kind of work for Sloop. So if there's no financial motive, and the medical reports are good, maybe I _can_ relax.'
'She had no money at all,' Reacher said. 'It was one of her big problems.'
Walker nodded. 'Good,' he said. 'Because _her_ big problems solve _my_ big problems.'
The office went quiet underneath the drone of the air conditioners. The back of Reacher's neck felt cold and wet.
'You should be more proactive,' he said. 'With the election.'
'Yeah, how?'
'Do something popular.'
'Like what?'
'Like reopen something about the Border Patrol. People would like that. I just met a family whose son was murdered by them.'
Walker went quiet again for a second, then just shook his head. 'Ancient history,' he said.
'Not to those families,' Reacher said. 'There were twenty-some homicides in a year. Most of the survivors live around here, probably. And most of them will be voters by now.'
'The Border Patrol was investigated,' Walker said. 'Before my time, but it was pretty damn thorough. I went through the files years ago.'
'You have the files?'
'Sure. Mostly happened down in Echo, and all that stuff comes here. It was clearly a bunch of rogue officers on a jag of their own, and the investigation most likely served to warn them off. They probably quit. Border Patrol has a pretty good turnover of staff. The bad guys could be anywhere by now, literally. Probably left the state altogether. It's not just the immigrants who flow north.'
'It would make you look good.'
Walker shrugged. 'I'm sure it would. A lot of things would make me look good. But I do have _some_ standards, Reacher. It would be a total waste of public money. Grandstanding, pure and simple. It wouldn't get anywhere. Nowhere at all. They're long gone. It's ancient history.'
'Twelve years ago isn't ancient history.'
'It is around here. Things change fast. Right now I'm concentrating on what happened in Echo last night, not twelve years ago.'
'OK,' Reacher said. 'Your decision.'
'I'll call Alice in the morning. When we get the material we need. Could be all over by lunch time.'
'Let's hope so.'
'Yeah, let's,' Walker said.
Reacher went out through the hot trapped air in the stairwell and stepped outside. It was hotter still on the sidewalk. So hot, it was difficult to breathe properly. It felt like all the oxygen molecules had been burned out of the air. He made it across the street and down to the mission with sweat running into his eyes. He pushed in through the door and found Alice sitting alone at her desk.
'You back already?' he asked, surprised.
She just nodded.
'Did you see her?'
She nodded again.
'What did she say?'
'Nothing at all,' Alice said. 'Except she doesn't want me to represent her.'
'What do you mean?'
'What I said. Literally the only words I got out of her were, and I quote, I refuse to be represented by you.'
'Why?'
'She didn't say. She said nothing at all. I just told you that. Except she doesn't want me on the case.'
'Why the hell not?'
Alice just shrugged and said nothing.
'Has this kind of a thing ever happened before?'
Alice shook her head. 'Not to me. Not to anybody within living memory in this place. Normally they can't make their minds up whether to bite your hand off or smother you with hugs and kisses.'
'So what the hell happened?'
'I don't know. She was fairly calm, fairly rational.'
'Did you try to persuade her?'
'Of course I did. To a point. But I wanted to get out of there before she lost it and started hollering. A witness hears her say it, I lose all standing. And then she's really in trouble. I plan to go back and try again later.'
'Did you tell her I sent you?'
'Sure I did. I used your name. Reacher this, Reacher that. Made no difference. All she said was she refused representation. Over and over again, three or four times. Then she gave me the silent treatment.'
'Can you think of a reason?'
Alice shrugged. 'Not really, in the circumstances. I mean, I'm not exactly Perry Mason. Maybe I don't inspire much confidence. I go in there half naked and sweating like a pig, and if this was Wall Street or somewhere I could understand somebody taking one look and thinking _wow, like, forget about it_. But this isn't Wall Street. This is Pecos County jail, and she's Hispanic, and I'm a lawyer with a pulse, so she should have been dancing with joy I came at all.'
'So why?'
'It's inexplicable.'
'What happens now?'
'Now it's a balancing act. I have to get her to accept representation before anybody hears her refuse it.'
'And if she still doesn't?'
'Then I go about my business and she's completely on her own. Until six months from now when the indictment's in and some crony of the judge's sends some useless jerk to see her.'
Reacher was quiet for a moment. 'I'm sorry, Alice. I had no idea this would happen.'
'Not your fault.'
'Go back about seven, OK?' he said. 'When the upstairs offices are empty and before the night shift woman comes on. She struck me as nosier than the day guy. He probably won't pay too much attention. So you can press her some. Let her holler, if she wants to.'
'OK,' she said. 'Seven o'clock it is. Hell of a day. Up and down like a roller coaster.'
'Like life itself,' Reacher said.
She smiled, briefly. 'Where will I find you?'
'I'm in the last motel before the highway.'
'You like traffic noise?'
'I like cheap. Room eleven, name of Millard Fillmore.'
'Why?'
'Habit,' he said. 'I like aliases. I like anonymity.'
'So who is Millard Fillmore?'
'President, two before Abraham Lincoln. From New York.'
She was quiet for a moment. 'Should I dress up like a lawyer for her? You think that might make a difference?'
Reacher shrugged. 'I doubt it. Look at me. I look like a scarecrow, and she never said anything about it.'
Alice smiled again. 'You do a little, you know. I saw you come in this morning and I thought _you_ were the client. Some kind of homeless guy in trouble.'
'This is a new outfit,' Reacher said. 'Fresh on today.'
She looked him over again and said nothing. He left her with paperwork to do and walked as far as the pizza parlour south of the courthouse. It was nearly full with people and had a huge air conditioner over the door spilling a continuous stream of moisture on the sidewalk. Clearly it was the coldest place in town, and therefore right then the most popular. He went in and got the last table and drank ice water as fast as the busboy could refill his glass. Then he ordered an anchovy pizza, heavy on the fish. He figured his body needed to replace salt.
As he ate it a new description was being passed by phone to the killing crew. The call was carefully rerouted through Dallas and Las Vegas to a motel room a hundred miles from Pecos. The call was made by a man, speaking quietly but clearly. It contained a detailed identification of a new target, a male, starting with his full name and his age, and accompanied by an exact rundown of his physical appearance and all of his likely destinations within the next forty-eight hours.
The information was taken by the woman, because she had sent her partners out to eat. She made no notes. She was naturally cautious about leaving written evidence, and she had an excellent memory. It had been honed by constant practice. She listened carefully until the caller stopped talking and then she decided the crew's price. She wasn't reluctant to speak on the phone. She was talking through an electronic device bought in the Valley that made her sound like a robot with a head cold. So she named the price and then listened to the silence on the other end. Listened to the guy deciding whether to negotiate the cost. But he didn't. Just said _OK_ and hung up. The woman smiled. _Smart guy_ , she thought. Her crew didn't work for cheapskates. A parsimonious attitude about money betrayed all kinds of other negative possibilities.
Reacher had ice cream after the pizza, and more water, and then coffee. He lingered over it as long as was reasonable and then he paid his check and walked back to his motel room. The heat felt worse than ever after being cold and dry for an hour. He took a long shower in tepid water and rinsed his clothes in the sink. Shook them hard to eliminate the wrinkles and arranged them on a chair to dry. Then he turned the room air to high and lay down on the bed to wait for Alice. Checked his watch. He figured if she got there any time after eight o'clock it would be a good sign, because if Carmen decided to get serious they would need to talk for at least an hour. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
THIRTEEN
She got there at seven twenty. He woke from a feverish overheated doze and heard a tentative knock at his door. Rolled off the bed and wrapped a damp towel around his waist and padded barefoot across the dirty carpet and opened up. Alice was standing there. He looked at her. She just shook her head. He stared out at the dusk light for a second. Her yellow car was parked in the lot. He turned and stepped back into the room. She followed him inside.
'I tried everything,' she said.
She had changed back into her lawyer outfit. The black pants and the jacket. The pants had a very high waistband, so high it almost met the bottom edge of the sports bra. There was an inch of tanned midriff showing. Apart from that, she looked exactly like the real deal. And he couldn't see how an inch of skin would be significant to a woman in Carmen's position.
'I asked her, was it me?' Alice said. 'Did she want somebody different? Older? A man? A Hispanic person?'
'What did she say?'
'She said she didn't want anybody at all.'
'That's crazy.'
'Yes, it is,' Alice said. 'I described her predicament. You know, in case she wasn't seeing it clearly. It made no difference.'
'Tell me everything she said.'
'I already have.'
Reacher was uncomfortable in the towel. It was too small.
'Let me put my pants on,' he said.
He scooped them off the chair and ducked into the bathroom. The pants were wet and clammy. He pulled them on and zipped them up. Came back out. Alice had taken her jacket off and laid it on the chair, next to his wet shirt. She was sitting on the bed with her elbows on her knees.
'I tried everything,' she said again. 'I said, show me your arm. She said, what for? I said, I want to see how good your veins are. Because that's where the lethal injection will go. I told her she'd be strapped down on the gurney, I described the drugs she'd get. I told her about the people behind the glass, there to watch her die.'
'And?'
'It made no difference at all. Like talking to the wall.'
'How hard did you push?'
'I shouted a little. But she waited me out and just repeated herself. She's refusing representation, Reacher. We better face it.'
'Is that kosher?'
'Of course it is. No law says you _have_ to have counsel. Just that you have to be _offered_ counsel.'
'Isn't it evidence of insanity or something?'
She shook her head. 'Not in itself,' she said. 'Otherwise every murderer would just refuse to have a lawyer and automatically get off with an incapacity defence.'
'She's not a murderer.'
'She doesn't seem very anxious to prove it.'
'Did anybody hear her?'
'Not yet. But I'm worried. Logically her next move is to put it in writing. Then I can't even get in the door. Nor can anybody else.'
'So what do we do?'
'We have to finesse her. That's all we _can_ do. We have to just ignore her completely and keep on dealing with Walker behind her back. On her behalf. If we can get him to drop the charges, then we've set her free whether she wants us to or not.'
He shrugged. 'Then that's what we'll do. But it's completely bizarre, isn't it?'
'It sure is,' Alice said. 'I never heard of such a thing before.'
A hundred miles away, the two male members of the killing crew returned to their motel after eating dinner. They had chosen pizza, too, but with pitchers of cold beer instead of water and coffee. They found the woman waiting for them inside their room. She was alert and pacing, which they recognized as a sign of news.
'What?' the tall man asked.
'A supplementary job,' she said.
'Where?'
'Pecos.'
'Is that smart?'
She nodded. 'Pecos is still safe enough.'
'You think?' the dark man asked.
'Wait until you hear what he's paying.'
'When?'
'Depends on the prior commitment.'
'OK,' the tall man said. 'Who's the target?'
'Just some guy,' the woman said. 'I'll give you the details when we've done the other thing.'
She walked to the door. 'Stay inside now, OK?' she said. 'Get to bed, get some sleep. We've got a very busy day coming up.'
'This is a crummy room,' Alice said.
Reacher glanced around. 'You think?'
'It's awful.'
'I've had worse.'
She paused a beat. 'You want dinner?'
He was full of pizza and ice cream, but the inch of midriff was attractive. So was the corresponding inch of her back. There was a deep cleft there. The waistband of the pants spanned it like a tiny bridge.
'Sure,' he said. 'Where?'
She paused again. 'My place?' she said. 'It's difficult for me to eat out around here. I'm a vegetarian. So usually I cook for myself.'
'A vegetarian in Texas,' he said. 'You're a long way from home.'
'Sure feels like it,' she said. 'So how about it? And I've got better air conditioning than this.'
He smiled. 'Woman-cooked food _and_ better air? Sounds good to me.'
'You eat vegetarian?'
'I eat anything.'
'So let's go.'
He shrugged his damp shirt on. She picked up her jacket. He found his shoes. Locked up the room and followed her over to the car.
She drove a couple of miles west to a low-rise residential complex built on a square of scrubby land trapped between two four-lane roads. The buildings had stucco walls painted the colour of sand with dark-stained wooden beams stuck all over the place for accents. There were maybe forty rental units and they all looked halfhearted and beaten down by the heat. Hers was right in the centre, like a small city townhouse sandwiched between two others. She parked outside her door on a fractured concrete pad. There were parched desert weeds wilting in the cracks.
But it was gloriously cool inside the house. There was central air running hard. He could feel the pressure it was creating. There was a narrow living room with a kitchen area at the back. A staircase on the left. Cheap rented furniture and a lot of books. No television.
'I'm going to shower,' she said. 'Make yourself at home.'
She disappeared up the stairs. He took a look around. The books were mostly law texts. The civil and criminal codes of Texas. Some constitutional commentaries. There was a phone on a side table with four speed dials programmed. Top slot was labelled _Work_. Second was _J Home_. Third was _J Work._ Fourth was _M &D_. On one of the bookshelves there was a photograph in a silver frame, showing a handsome couple who could have been in their middle fifties. It was a casual outdoors shot, in a city, probably New York. The man had grey hair and a long patrician face. The woman looked a little like an older version of Alice herself. Same hair, minus the colour and the youthful bounce. The Park Avenue parents, no doubt. Mom and Dad, M & D. They looked OK. He figured J was probably a boy friend. He checked, but there was no photograph of him. Maybe his picture was upstairs, next to her bed.
He sat in a chair and she came back down within ten minutes. Her hair was wet and combed, and she was wearing shorts again with a T-shirt that probably said _Harvard Soccer_ except it had been washed so many times the writing was nearly illegible. The shorts were short and the T-shirt was thin and tight. She had dispensed with the sports bra. That was clear. She was barefoot and looked altogether sensational.
'You played soccer?' he asked.
'My partner did,' she said.
He smiled at the warning. 'Does he still?'
'He's a she. Judith. I'm gay. And yes, she still plays.'
'She any good?'
'As a partner?'
'As a soccer player.'
'She's pretty good. Does it bother you?'
'That she's pretty good at soccer?'
'No, that I'm gay.'
'Why would it?'
Alice shrugged. 'It bothers some people.'
'Not this one.'
'I'm Jewish, too.'
Reacher smiled. 'Did your folks buy you the handgun?'
She glanced at him. 'You found that?'
'Sure,' he said. 'Nice piece.'
She nodded. 'A gay Jewish vegetarian woman from New York, they figured I should have it.'
Reacher smiled again. 'I'm surprised they didn't get you a machine gun or a grenade launcher.'
She smiled back. 'I'm sure they thought about it.'
'You obviously take your atoning seriously. You must feel like I did walking around in the Lebanon.'
She laughed. 'Actually, it's not so bad here. Texas is a pretty nice place, overall. Some great people, really.'
'What does Judith do?'
'She's a lawyer, too. She's in Mississippi right now.'
'Same reasons?'
Alice nodded. 'A five-year plan.'
'There's hope for the legal profession yet.'
'So it doesn't bother you?' she said. 'That it's just a meal with a new friend and then back to the motel on your own?'
'I never thought it would be anything else,' he lied.
The meal was excellent. It had to be, because he wasn't hungry. It was some kind of a home-made dark chewy confection made out of crushed nuts bound together with cheese and onions. Probably full of protein. Maybe some vitamins, too. They drank a little wine and a lot of water with it. He helped her clear up and then they talked until eleven.
'I'll drive you back,' she said.
But she was barefoot and comfortable, so he shook his head. 'I'll walk,' he said. 'Couple of miles will do me good.'
'It's still hot,' she said.
'Don't worry. I'll be OK.'
She didn't put up much of a protest. He arranged to meet her at the mission in the morning and said goodnight. The outside air was as thick as soup. The walk took forty minutes and his shirt was soaked again when he got back to the motel.
He woke early in the morning and rinsed his clothes and put them on wet. They were dry by the time he reached the law offices. The humidity had gone and the hot desert air sucked the moisture right out of them and left them as stiff as new canvas. The sky was blue and completely empty.
Alice was already at her usual desk in a black A-line dress with no sleeves. A Mexican guy was occupying one of her client chairs. He was talking quietly to her. She was writing on a yellow pad. The young intern from Hack Walker's office was waiting patiently behind the Mexican guy's shoulder. He was holding a thin orange and blue FedEx packet in his hand. Reacher took a place right behind him. Alice was suddenly aware of the gathering crowd and looked up. Sketched a surprised _just a minute_ gesture in the air and turned back to her client. Eventually put her pencil down and spoke quietly in Spanish. The guy responded with stoic blank-faced patience and stood up and shuffled away. The intern moved forward and laid the FedEx packet on the desk.
'Carmen Greer's medical reports,' he said. 'These are the originals. Mr Walker took copies. He wants a conference at nine thirty.'
'We'll be there,' Alice said.
She pulled the packet slowly toward her. The intern followed the Mexican guy out. Reacher sat down in the client chair. Alice glanced at him, her fingers resting on the packet, a puzzled expression on her face. He shrugged. The packet was a lot thinner than he had expected, too.
She unfolded the flap and pressed the edges of the packet inward so it opened like a mouth. Held it up and spilled the contents on the desk. There were four separate reports packed loose in individual green covers. Each cover was marked with Carmen's name and her social security number and a patient reference. There were dates on all of them. The dates ranged back more than six years. The older the date, the paler the cover, like the green colour had faded out with age. Reacher slid his chair round the desk and put it next to Alice's. She stacked the four reports in date order, with the oldest at the top of the pile. She opened it up and nudged it left, so it was exactly between them. Then she moved her chair a fraction, so her shoulder was touching his.
'OK,' she said. 'So let's see.'
The first report was about Ellie's birth. The whole thing was timed in hours and minutes. There was a lot of gynaecological stuff about dilation and contractions. Foetal monitors had been attached. An epidural anaesthetic had been administered at thirteen minutes past four in the morning. It had been judged fully effective by four twenty. There had been a delivery-room shift change at six. Labour had continued until the following lunch time. Accelerants had been used. An episiotomy had been performed at one o'clock. Ellie had been born at twenty-five minutes past. No complications. Normal delivery of the placenta. The episiotomy had been stitched immediately. The baby was pronounced viable in every respect.
There was no mention of facial bruising, or a split lip, or loosened teeth.
The second report concerned two cracked ribs. It was dated in the spring, fifteen months after childbirth. There was an X-ray film attached. It showed the whole left side of her upper torso. The ribs were bright white. Two of them had tiny grey cracks. Her left breast was a neat dark shape. The attending physician had noted that the patient reported being thrown from a horse and landing hard against the top rail of a section of ranch fencing. As was usual with rib injuries, there was nothing much to be done except bind them tight and recommend plenty of physical rest.
'What do you think?' Alice asked.
'Could be something,' Reacher said.
The third report was dated six months later, at the end of the summer. It concerned severe bruising to Carmen's lower right leg. The same physician noted she reported falling from a horse while jumping and landing with her shin against the pole that constituted the obstacle the horse was attempting. There was a long technical description of the contusion, with measurements vertically and laterally. The affected area was a tilted oval, four inches wide and five long. X-rays had been taken. The bone was not fractured. Painkillers had been prescribed and the first day's supply provided from the emergency room pharmacy.
The fourth report was dated two and a half years later, which was maybe nine months before Sloop went to prison. It showed a broken collar bone on the right side. All the names in the file were new. It seemed like the whole ER staff had turned over. There was a new name for the attending physician, and she made no comment about Carmen's claim to have fallen off her horse onto the rocks of the mesa. There were extensive detailed notes about the injury. They were very thorough. There was an X-ray film. It showed the curve of her neck, and her shoulder. The collar bone was cleanly snapped in the middle.
Alice squared all four reports together, upside down on the desk.
'Well?' she said.
Reacher made no reply. Just shook his head.
'Well?' she said again.
'Maybe she sometimes went to another hospital,' he said.
'No, we'd have picked it up. I told you, we ask at all of them. Matter of routine.'
'Maybe they drove out of state.'
'We checked,' she said. 'Domestic violence, we cover all neighbouring states. I told you that, too. Routine guidelines.'
'Maybe she used another name.'
'They're logged by social security number.'
He nodded. 'This isn't enough, Alice. She told me about more than this. We've got the ribs and we've got the collar bone, but she claimed he broke her arm too. Also her jaw. She said she'd had three teeth re-implanted.'
Alice said nothing. He closed his eyes. Tried to think about it the way he would have in the old days, an experienced investigator with a suspicious mind and thirteen years of hard time behind him.
'Two possibilities,' he said. 'One, the hospital records system screwed up.'
Alice shook her head. 'Very unlikely.'
He nodded again. 'Agreed. So two, she _was_ lying.'
Alice was quiet for a long moment. 'Exaggerating, maybe,' she said. 'You know, to lock you in. To make sure of your help.'
He nodded again, vaguely. Checked his watch. It was twenty past nine. He leaned sideways and slipped the stacked reports back into the FedEx packet.
'Let's go see what Hack thinks,' he said.
Two-thirds of the killing crew rolled south out of Pecos, uncharacteristically quiet. The third member waited in the motel room, pensive. They were taking risks now. Twelve years in the business, and they had never worked one area so long. It had always seemed too dangerous. In and out, quick and clean, had been their preferred method. Now they were departing from it. Radically. So there had been no conversation that morning. No jokes, no banter. No pre-mission excitement. Just a lot of nervous preoccupation with private thoughts.
But they had readied the car on schedule, and assembled the things they would need. Then they had half eaten breakfast, and sat quiet, checking their watches.
'Nine twenty,' the woman said eventually. 'It's time.'
There was a visitor already seated in Walker's office. He was a man of maybe seventy, overweight and florid, and he was suffering badly in the heat. The air conditioners were going so hard that the rush of air was audible over the drone of the motors and papers were lifting off the desk. But the indoor temperature was still somewhere in the middle nineties. The visitor was mopping his brow with a large white handkerchief. Walker himself had his jacket off and was sitting absolutely still in his chair with his head in his hands. He had copies of the medical reports laid side by side on his desk and he was staring at them like they were written in a foreign language. He looked up blankly, and then he made a vague gesture toward the stranger.
'This is Cowan Black,' he said. 'Eminent professor of forensic medicine, lots of other things, too. The renowned defence expert. This is probably the first time he's ever been in a DA's office.'
Alice stepped over and shook the guy's hand. 'I'm very pleased to meet you, sir,' she said. 'I've heard a lot about you.'
Cowan Black said nothing. Alice introduced Reacher and they all shuffled their chairs into an approximate semicircle around the desk.
'The reports came in first thing this morning,' Walker said. 'Everything on file from Texas, which was one hospital only. There was nothing at all from New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Louisiana. I personally photocopied everything and immediately sent the originals over to you. Dr Black arrived a half-hour ago and has studied the copies. He wants to see the X-rays. Those, I couldn't copy.'
Reacher passed the FedEx packet to Black, who spilled the contents the same way Alice had and extracted the three X-ray films. The ribs, the leg, the collar bone. He held them up against the light from the window and studied them, one by one, for minutes each. Then he slipped them back in their appropriate folders, neatly, like he was a man accustomed to order and precision.
Walker sat forward. 'So, Dr Black, are you able to offer us a preliminary opinion?'
He sounded tense, and very formal, like he was already in court. Black picked up the first folder. The oldest, the palest, the one about Ellie's birth.
'This is nothing at all,' he said. His voice was deep and dark and rotund, like a favourite uncle in an old movie. A perfect voice for the witness stand. 'This is purely routine obstetrics. Interesting only in that a rural Texas hospital was operating at a level that would have been considered state-of-the-art a decade or so earlier.'
'Nothing untoward?'
'Nothing at all. One assumes the husband caused the pregnancy, but aside from that there's no evidence he did anything to her.'
'The others?'
Black switched files, to the damaged ribs. Pulled the X-ray film out again, and held it ready.
'Ribs are there for a purpose,' he said. 'They form a hard, bony, protective cage to protect the vulnerable internal organs from damage. But not a _rigid_ cage. That would be foolish, and evolution isn't a foolish process. No, the rib cage is a sophisticated structure. If it _were_ rigid, the bones would shatter under any kind of severe blow. But there's complex ligament suspension involved at each of the bone terminations, so the cage's first response is to yield and distort, in order to spread the force of the impact.'
He held up the X-ray film and pointed here and there on it.
'And that's exactly what happened here,' he said. 'There is obvious stretching and tearing of the ligaments all over the place. This was a heavy diffuse blow with a broad, blunt instrument. The force was dissipated by the flexibility of the rib cage, but even so was sufficient to crack two of the bones.'
'What kind of a blunt instrument?' Walker asked.
'Something long and hard and rounded, maybe five or six inches in diameter. Something exactly like a fencing rail, I would think.'
'It couldn't have been a kick?'
Black shook his head. 'Emphatically, no,' he said. 'A kick transfers a lot of energy through a tiny contact area. The welt at the toe of a boot is what? Maybe an inch and a half by a quarter-inch? That's essentially a _sharp_ object, not a blunt object. It would be too sudden and too concentrated for the yielding effect to operate. We would see the cracked bones, for sure, but we wouldn't see the ligament stretching at all.'
'What about a knee?'
'A knee in the ribs? That's similar to a punch. Blunt, but an essentially circular impact site. The ligament stretching would show a completely different pattern.'
Walker drummed his fingers on his desk. He was starting to sweat. 'Any way a person could have done it?' he asked.
Black shrugged. 'If he were some kind of contortionist, maybe. If he could hold his whole leg completely rigid and somehow jump up and hit her in the side with it. Like it was a fence railing. I would say it was completely impossible.'
Walker went quiet for a second. 'What about the bruised shin?' he asked.
Black swapped the third file into his hand. Opened it and read through the description of the contusion again. Then he shook his head.
'The shape of the bruise is crucial,' he said. 'Again, it's what you'd get from the impact of a long hard rounded object. Like a fence rail again, or maybe a sewer pipe, striking against the front of the shin at an oblique angle.'
'Could he have hit her with a length of pipe?'
Black shrugged again. 'Theoretically, I suppose,' he said. 'If he was standing almost behind her, and somehow could reach over her, and he swung a hard downward blow, and struck her almost but not quite parallel with her leg. He'd have to do it two-handed, because nobody can hold a six-inch diameter pipe one-handed. Probably he'd have to stand on a chair, and position her very carefully in front of it. It's not very likely, is it?'
'But is it possible?'
'No,' Black said. 'It isn't possible. I say that now, and I'd certainly have to say it under oath.'
Walker was quiet again. 'What about the collar bone?' he asked.
Black picked up the last report. 'These are very detailed notes,' he said. 'Clearly an excellent physician.'
'But what do they tell you?'
'It's a classic injury,' Black said. 'The collar bone is like a circuit breaker. A person falls, and they try to break their fall by throwing out their hand. Their whole body weight is turned into a severe physical impact which travels upward as a shock wave through their rigid arm, through their rigid shoulder joint, and onward. Now, if it wasn't for the collar bone, that force would travel into the neck, and probably break it, causing paralysis. Or into the brain pan, causing unconsciousness, maybe a chronic comatose state. But evolution is smart, and it chooses the least of all the evils. The collar bone snaps, thereby dissipating the force. Inconvenient and painful, to be sure, but not life-threatening. A mechanical circuit breaker, and generations of bicyclists and inline skaters and horseback riders have very good reason to be grateful for it.'
'Falling can't be the only way,' Walker said.
'It's the _main_ way,' Black said. 'And almost always the only way. But occasionally I've seen it happen other ways too. A downward blow with a baseball bat aimed at the head might miss and break the collar bone. Falling beams in a burning building might impact against the top of the shoulder. I've seen that with firefighters.'
'Carmen Greer wasn't a firefighter,' Walker said. 'And there's no evidence a baseball bat was involved any other time.'
Nobody spoke. The roar of the air conditioners filled the silence.
'OK,' Walker said. 'Let me put it this way. I need evidence that there was violent physical abuse against this woman. Is there any here?'
Black went quiet for a spell. Then he simply shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'Not within the bounds of reasonable likelihood.'
'None at all? Not even a shred?'
'No, I'm afraid not.'
'Stretching the bounds of reasonable likelihood?'
'There's nothing there.'
'Stretching the bounds all the way until they break?'
'Still nothing. She had a normal pregnancy and she was an unlucky horseback rider. That's all I see here.'
'No reasonable doubt?' Walker said. 'That's all I need. Just a shred will do.'
'It's not there.'
Walker paused a beat. 'Doctor, please let me say this with the greatest possible respect, OK? From a DA's point of view, you've been a pain in the rear end many more times than I can remember, to me and my colleagues throughout the state. There have been times when we're not sure what you've been smoking. You've always been capable of coming up with the most bizarre explanations for almost anything. So I'm asking you. Please. Is there any way _at all_ you could interpret this stuff differently?'
Black didn't answer.
'I'm sorry,' Walker said. 'I offended you.'
'Not in the way you think you did,' Black said. 'The fact is, I've never offered a bizarre explanation of anything. If I see possible exoneration, I speak up in court, sure. But what you clearly fail to understand is if I _don't_ see possible exoneration, then I don't speak up _at all_. What your colleagues and I have clashed over in the past is merely the tip of the iceberg. Cases that have no merit don't get to trial, because I advise the defence to plead them out and hope for mercy. And I see many, many cases that have no merit.'
'Cases like this one?'
Black nodded. 'I'm afraid so. If I had been retained by Ms Aaron directly, I would tell her that her client's word is not to be trusted. And you're right, I say that very reluctantly, with a long and honourable record of preferring to take the defence's side. Which is a record I have always maintained, despite the attendant risk of annoying our districts' attorneys. And which is a record I always aim to continue, for as long as I am spared. Which might not be much longer, if this damn heat keeps up.'
He paused a second and looked around.
'For which reason I must take my leave of you now,' he said. 'I'm very sorry I was unable to help you, Mr Walker. Really. It would have been enormously satisfying.'
He squared the reports together and slipped them back into the FedEx packet. Handed it to Reacher, who was nearest. Then he stood up and headed for the door.
'But there has to be something,' Walker said. 'I don't believe this. The one time in my life I _want_ Cowan Black to come up with something, and he can't.'
Black shook his head. 'I learned a long time ago, sometimes they're just guilty.'
He sketched a brief gesture that was half-wave, half-salute, and walked slowly out of the office. The breeze from the air conditioners caught the door and crashed it shut behind him. Alice and Reacher said nothing. Just watched Walker at his desk. Walker dropped his head into his hands and closed his eyes.
'Go away,' he said. 'Just get the hell out of here and leave me alone.'
The air in the stairwell was hot, and it was worse still out on the sidewalk. Reacher swapped the FedEx packet into his left hand and caught Alice's arm with his right. Stopped her at the kerb.
'Is there a good jeweller in town?' he asked.
'I guess,' she said. 'Why?'
'I want you to sign out her personal property. You're still her lawyer, as far as anybody knows. We'll get her ring appraised. Then we'll find out if she's telling the truth about _anything_.'
'You still got doubts?'
'I'm from the Army. First we check, then we double-check.'
'OK,' she said. 'If you want.'
They turned round and walked down the alley and she took possession of Carmen's lizard skin belt and her ring by signing a form that specified both items as material evidence. Then they went looking for a jeweller. They walked away from the cheap streets and found one ten minutes later in a row of upmarket boutiques. The window display was too crowded to be called elegant, but judging by the price tags the owner had a feel for quality. Or for blind optimism.
'So how do we do this?' Alice asked.
'Make out it's an estate sale,' Reacher said. 'Maybe it belonged to your grandmother.'
The guy in the store was old and stooped. He might have looked pretty sharp forty years ago. But he still acted sharp. Reacher saw a flash in his eyes. _Cops?_ Then he saw him answer his own question in the negative. Alice didn't look like a cop. Neither did Reacher, which was a mistaken impression he'd traded on for years. Then the guy went into an assessment of how smart these new customers might be. It was transparent, at least to Reacher. He was accustomed to watching people make furtive calculations. He saw him decide to proceed with caution. Alice produced the ring and told him she'd inherited it from family. Told him she was thinking of selling it, if the price was right.
The guy held it under a desk lamp and put a loupe in his eye.
'Colour, clarity, cut and carat,' he said. 'The four Cs. That's what we look for.'
He turned the stone left and right. It flashed in the light. He picked up a slip of stiff card that had circular holes punched through it. They started small and got bigger. He fitted the stone in the holes until he found one that fit exactly.
'Two and a quarter carats,' he said. 'Cut is real handsome. Colour is good, maybe _just_ on the yellow side of truly excellent. Clarity isn't flawless, but it's not very far off. This stone ain't bad. Not bad at all. How much do you want for it?'
'Whatever it's worth,' Alice said.
'I could give you twenty,' the guy said.
'Twenty what?'
'Thousand dollars,' the guy said.
'Twenty thousand dollars?'
The guy put up his hands, palms out, defensively.
'I know, I know,' he said. 'Someone probably told you it's worth more. And maybe it is, retail, some big fancy store, Dallas or somewhere. But this is Pecos, and you're selling, not buying. And I have to make my profit.'
'I'll think about it,' Alice said.
'Twenty-five?' the guy said.
'Twenty- _five_ thousand dollars?'
The guy nodded. 'That's about as high as I can go, being fair to myself. I got to eat, after all.'
'Let me think about it,' Alice said.
'Well, don't think too long,' the guy said. 'The market might change. And I'm the only game in town. Piece like this, it'll scare anybody else.'
They stopped together on the sidewalk right outside the store. Alice was holding the ring like it was red hot. Then she opened her pocketbook and put it in a zippered compartment. Used her fingertips to push it all the way down.
'Guy like that says twenty-five, it's got to be worth sixty,' Reacher said. 'Maybe more. Maybe a lot more. My guess is he's not the Better Business Bureau's poster boy.'
'A lot more than thirty dollars, anyway,' Alice said. 'A fake? Cubic zirconium? She's playing us for fools.'
He nodded, vaguely. He knew she meant _playing you for a fool_. He knew she was too polite to say it.
'Let's go,' he said.
They walked west through the heat, back to the cheap part of town, beyond the courthouse, next to the railroad tracks. It was about a mile, and they spent thirty minutes on it. It was too hot to hurry. He didn't speak the whole way. Just fought his usual interior battle about exactly when to give up on a lost cause.
He stopped her again at the door to the mission.
'I want to try one last thing,' he said.
'Why?' she asked.
'Because I'm from the Army,' he said. 'First we double-check, then we triple-check.'
She sighed. A little impatience there. 'What do you want to do?'
'You need to drive me.'
'Where?'
'There's an eyewitness we can talk to.'
'An _eyewitness_?Where?'
'In school, down in Echo.'
'The _kid_?'
He nodded. 'Ellie. She's sharp as a tack.'
'She's six years old.'
'If it was happening, I'll bet she knows.'
Alice stood completely still for a second. Then she glanced in through the windows. The place was crowded with customers. They looked listless from the heat and beaten down by life.
'It's not fair to _them_ ,' she said. 'I need to move on.'
'Just this one last thing.'
'I'll lend you the car again. You can go alone.'
He shook his head. 'I need your opinion. You're the lawyer. And I won't get in the school house without you. You've got status. I haven't.'
'I can't do it. It'll take all day.'
'How long would it have taken to get the money from the rancher? How many billable hours?'
'We don't bill.'
'You know what I mean.'
She was quiet for a moment. 'OK,' she said. 'A deal's a deal, I guess.'
'This is the last thing, I promise.'
'Why, exactly?' she asked.
They were in the yellow VW, heading south on the empty road out of Pecos. He recognized none of the landmarks. It had been dark when he came the other way in the back of the police cruiser.
'Because I was an investigator,' he said.
'OK,' she said. 'Investigators investigate. That, I can follow. But don't they _stop_ investigating? I mean, ever? When they _know_ already?'
'Investigators never know,' he said. 'They feel, and they guess.'
'I thought they dealt in facts.'
'Not really,' he said. 'I mean, eventually they do, I suppose. But ninety-nine per cent of the time it's ninety-nine per cent about what you _feel_. About people. A good investigator is a person with a feel for people.'
'Feeling doesn't change black into white.'
He nodded. 'No, it doesn't.'
'Weren't you ever wrong before?'
'Of course I was. Lots of times.'
'But?'
'But I don't think I'm wrong now.'
'So why, exactly?' she asked again.
'Because I know things about people, Alice.'
'So do I,' she said. 'Like, I know Carmen Greer suckered you, too.'
He said nothing more. Just watched her drive, and looked at the view ahead. He could see mountains in the distance, where Carmen had chased the school bus. He had the FedEx packet on his knees. He fanned himself with it. Balanced it on his fingers. Turned it over and over, aimlessly. Stared down at the front and the back, at the orange and blue design, at the label, at the meaningless little words all over it, sender, addressee, _extremely urgent_ , commodity description, dimensions in inches, twelve by nine, weight in pounds, two point six, payment, recipient's contact information, overnight, no post office box number, shipper must check: _this shipment does not contain dangerous goods_. He shook his head and pitched it behind him, onto the back seat.
'She had no money with her,' he said.
Alice said nothing back. Just drove on, piloting the tiny car fast and economically. He could feel her pitying him. It was suddenly coming off her in waves.
'What?' he said.
'We should turn round,' she said. 'This is a complete waste of time.'
'Why?'
'Because exactly what is Ellie going to tell us? I mean, I can follow your thinking. If Carmen really _did_ get a broken arm, then she must have been wearing a plaster cast for six weeks. And Ellie's a smart kid, so she'll recall it. Same for the jaw thing. Broken jaw, you're all wired up for a spell. Certainly a kid would remember _that_. _If_ any of this really happened, and _if_ it happened recently enough for her to remember anything at all.'
'But?'
'But we _know_ she was never in a cast. We _know_ she never had her jaw wired. We've got her medical records, remember? They're right here in the car with us. Everything she ever went to the hospital for. Or do you think setting bones is a do-it-yourself activity? You think the blacksmith did it in the barn? So the very best Ellie can do is confirm what we already know. And most likely she won't remember anything anyway, because she's just a kid. So this trip is a _double_ waste of time.'
'Let's do it anyway,' he said. 'We're halfway there already. She might recall something useful. And I want to see her again. She's a great kid.'
'I'm sure she is,' Alice said. 'But spare yourself, OK? Because what are you going to do? Adopt her? She's the one with the raw end of this deal, so you might as well accept it and forget all about her.'
They didn't speak again until they arrived at the crossroads with the diner and the school and the gas station. Alice parked exactly where Carmen had and they got out together into the heat.
'I better come with you,' Reacher said. 'She knows me. We can bring her out and talk in the car.'
They went through the wire gate into the yard. Then through the main door into the schoolhouse itself, into the school smell. They were out again a minute later. Ellie Greer wasn't there, and she hadn't been there the day before, either.
'Understandable, I guess,' Alice said. 'Traumatic time for her.'
Reacher nodded. 'So let's go. It's only another hour south.'
'Great,' Alice said.
They got back in the VW and drove the next sixty miles of parched emptiness without talking. It took a little less than an hour, because Alice drove faster than Carmen had wanted to. Reacher recognized the landmarks. He saw the old oil field, on the distant horizon off to the left. Greer Three.
'It's coming up,' he said.
Alice slowed. The red-painted picket fence replaced the wire and the gate swam into view through the haze. Alice braked and turned in under it. The small car bounced uncomfortably across the yard. She stopped it close to the bottom of the familiar porch steps and turned off the motor. The whole place was silent. No activity. But people were home, because all the cars were lined up in the vehicle barn. The white Cadillac was there, and the Jeep Cherokee, and the new pick-up, and the old pick-up. They were all crouched there in the shadows.
They got out of the car and stood for a second behind the open doors, like they offered protection from something. The air was very still, and hotter than ever. Easily a hundred and ten degrees, maybe more. He led her up the porch steps into the shadow of the roof and knocked on the door. It opened almost immediately. Rusty Greer was standing there. She was holding a .22 rifle, one-handed. She stayed silent for a long moment, just looking him over. Then she spoke.
'It's you,' she said. 'I thought it might be Bobby.'
'You lost him?' Reacher said.
Rusty shrugged. 'He went out. He isn't back yet.'
Reacher glanced back at the motor barn. 'All the cars are here,' he said.
'Somebody picked him up,' Rusty said. 'I was upstairs. Didn't see them. Just heard them.'
Reacher said nothing.
'Anyway,' Rusty said. 'I didn't expect to see you again, ever.'
'This is Carmen's lawyer,' Reacher said.
Rusty turned and glanced at Alice. 'This is the best she could do?'
'We need to see Ellie.'
'What for?'
'We're interviewing witnesses.'
'A child can't be a witness.'
'I'll decide that,' Alice said.
Rusty just smiled at her. 'Ellie's not here,' she said.
'Well, where is she?' Reacher said. 'She's not in school.'
Rusty said nothing.
'Mrs Greer, we need to know where Ellie is,' Alice said.
Rusty smiled again. 'I don't know where she is, lawyer girl.'
'Why not?' Alice asked.
'Because Family Services took her, that's why not.'
'When?'
'This morning. They came for her.'
'And you let them take her?' Reacher said.
'Why wouldn't I? I don't want her. Now that Sloop is gone.'
Reacher stared at her. 'But she's your granddaughter.'
Rusty made a dismissive gesture. The rifle moved in her hand.
'That's a fact I was never thrilled about,' she said.
'Where did they take her?'
'An orphanage, I guess,' Rusty said. 'And then she'll get adopted, if anybody wants her. Which they probably won't. I understand half-breeds are very difficult to place. Decent folk generally don't want beaner trash.'
There was silence. Just the tiny sounds of dry earth baking in the heat.
'I hope you get a tumour,' Reacher said.
He turned round and walked back to the car without waiting for Alice. Got in and slammed the door and sat staring forward with his face burning and his massive hands clenching and unclenching. She got in beside him and fired up the motor.
'Get me out of here,' he said. She took off in a cloud of dust. Neither of them spoke a single word, all the way north to Pecos.
It was three in the afternoon when they got back, and the legal mission was half empty because of the heat. There was the usual thicket of messages on Alice's desk. Five of them were from Hack Walker. They made a neat little sequence, each of them more urgent than the last.
'Shall we go?' Alice asked.
'Don't tell him about the diamond,' Reacher said.
'It's over now, don't you see?'
And it was. Reacher saw it right away in Walker's face. There was relaxation there. Some kind of finality. Closure. Some kind of peace. He was sitting behind his desk. His desk was all covered with papers. They were arranged in two piles. One was taller than the other.
'What?' Reacher asked.
Walker ignored him and handed a single sheet to Alice.
'Waiver of her Miranda rights,' he said. 'Read it carefully. She's declining legal representation, and she's declaring that it's entirely voluntary. And she adds that she refused _your_ representation from the very start.'
'I doubted her competence,' Alice said.
Walker nodded. 'I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. But there's no doubt now. So you're here purely as a courtesy, OK? Both of you.'
Then he handed over the smaller pile of papers. Alice took them and fanned them out and Reacher leaned to his right to look at them. They were computer print-outs. They were all covered in figures and dates. They were bank records. Balance statements and transaction listings. Credits and debits. There seemed to be five separate accounts. Two were regular chequing accounts. Three were money-market deposits. They were titled _Greer Non-Discretionary Trust #1_ through _#5_. The balances were healthy. Very healthy. There was a composite total somewhere near two million dollars.
'Al Eugene's people messengered them over,' Walker said. 'Now look at the bottom sheets.'
Alice riffed through. The bottom sheets were paper-clipped together. Reacher read over her shoulder. There was a lot of legal text. It added up to the formal minutes of a trust agreement. There was a notarized deed attached. It stated in relatively straightforward language that for the time being a single trustee was in absolute sole control of all Sloop Greer's funds. That single trustee was identified as Sloop Greer's legal wife, Carmen.
'She had two million bucks in the bank,' Walker said. 'All hers, effectively.'
Reacher glanced at Alice. She nodded.
'He's right,' she said.
'Now look at the last clause of the minutes,' Walker said.
Alice turned the page. The last clause concerned reversion. The trusts would become discretionary once again and return the funds to Sloop's own control at a future date to be specified by him. Unless he first became irreversibly mentally incapacitated. Or died. Whereupon all existing balances would become Carmen's sole property, in the first instance as a matter of prior agreement, and in the second, as a matter of inheritance.
'Is all of that clear?' Walker asked.
Reacher said nothing, but Alice nodded.
Then Walker passed her the taller pile.
'Now read this,' he said.
'What is it?' she asked.
'A transcript,' Walker said. 'Of her confession.'
There was silence.
'She confessed?' Alice said.
'We videotaped it,' Walker said.
'When?'
'Noon today. My assistant went to see her as soon as the financial stuff came in. We tried to find you first, but we couldn't. Then she told us she didn't want a lawyer anyway. So we had her sign the waiver. Then she spilled her guts. We brought her up here and videotaped the whole thing over again. It's not pretty.'
Reacher was half listening, half reading. It wasn't pretty. That was for damn sure. It started out with all the usual assurances about free will and absolute absence of coercion. She stated her name. Went all the way back to her LA days. She had been an illegitimate child. She had been a hooker. _Street stroller_ , she called it. Some odd barrio expression, Reacher assumed. Then she came off the streets and started stripping, and changed her title to _sex worker_. She had latched onto Sloop, just like Walker had claimed. _My meal ticket_ , she called him. Then it became a story of impatience. She was bored witless in Texas. She wanted out, but she wanted money in her pocket. The more money the better. Sloop's IRS trouble was a godsend. The trusts were tempting. She tried to have him killed in prison, which she knew from her peers was possible, but she found out that a federal minimum-security facility wasn't that sort of a place. So she waited. As soon as she heard he was getting out, she bought the gun and went recruiting. She planned to leverage her marks with invented stories about domestic violence. Reacher's name was mentioned as the last pick. He had refused, so she did it herself. Having already fabricated the abuse claims, she intended to use them to get off with self-defence, or diminished responsibility, or whatever else she could manage. But then she realized her hospital records would come up blank, so she was confessing and throwing herself on the mercy of the prosecutor. Her signature was scrawled on the bottom of every page.
Alice was a slow reader. She came to the end a full minute after him.
'I'm sorry, Reacher,' she said.
There was silence for a moment.
'What about the election?' Reacher asked. The last hope.
Walker shrugged. 'Texas code says it's a capital crime. Murder for remuneration. We've got enough evidence to choke a pig. And I can't ignore a voluntary confession, can I? So, couple hours ago I was pretty down. But then I got to thinking about it. Fact is, a voluntary confession helps me out. A confession and a guilty plea, saves the taxpayer the cost of a trial. Justifies me asking for a life sentence instead. The way I see it, with a story like that, she's going to look very, very bad, whoever you are. So if I back off the death penalty, I'll look magnanimous in comparison. Generous, even. The whites will fret a little, but the Mexicans will eat it up with a spoon. See what I mean? The whole thing is reversed now. She was the good guy, I was the heavy hand. But now she's the heavy hand, and I'm the good guy. So I think I'm OK.'
Nobody spoke for another minute. There was just the omnipresent roar of the air conditioners.
'I've got her property,' Alice said. 'A belt and a ring.'
'Take them to storage,' Walker said. 'We'll be moving her, later.'
'Where?'
'The penitentiary. We can't keep her here any more.'
'No, I meant where's storage?'
'Same building as the morgue. Make sure you get a receipt.'
Reacher walked with her over to the morgue. He wasn't aware of taking a single step. Wasn't aware of the heat, or the dust, or the noise, or the traffic, or the smells of the street. He felt like he was floating an inch above the sidewalk, insulated inside some kind of sensory-deprivation suit. Alice was talking to him, from time to time, but he was hearing nothing that she said. All he could hear was a small voice inside his head which was saying _you were wrong_. _Completely wrong_. It was a voice he had heard before, but that didn't make it any easier to hear again, because he had built his whole career on hearing it fewer times than the next guy. It was like a box score in his mind, and his average had just taken some serious damage. Which upset him. Not because of vanity. It upset him because he was a professional who was supposed to get things right.
'Reacher?' Alice was saying. 'You're not listening, are you?'
'What?' he said.
'I asked you, do you want to get a meal?'
'No,' he said. 'I want to get a ride.'
She stopped walking. 'What now? Quadruple-check?'
'No, I mean out of here. I want to go somewhere else. A long way away. I hear Antarctica is nice, this time of year.'
'The bus depot is on the way back to the office.'
'Good. I'll take a bus. Because I'm all done hitchhiking. You never know who's going to pick you up.'
The morgue was a low industrial shed in a paved yard behind the street. It could have been a brake shop or a tyre depot. It had metal siding and a roll-up vehicle door. There was a personnel entrance at the far end of the building. It had two steps up to it, framed by handrails fabricated from steel pipe. Inside, it was very cold. There were industrial strength air conditioners running full blast. It felt like a meat store. Which it was, in a way. To the left of the foyer was a double door which gave directly onto the morgue operation. It was standing open, and Reacher could see the autopsy tables. There was plenty of stainless steel and white tile and fluorescent light in there.
Alice put the lizard skin belt on the reception counter and dug in her pocketbook for the ring. She told the attendant they were for _Texas versus Carmen Greer_. He went away and came back with the evidence box.
'No, it's personal property,' she said. 'Not evidence. I'm sorry.'
The guy gave her a _why-didn't-you-say-so_ look and turned round.
'Wait,' Reacher called. 'Let me see that.'
The guy paused, and then he turned back and slid the box across the counter. It had no lid, so it was really just a cardboard tray maybe three inches deep. Somebody had written _Greer_ on the front edge with a marker pen. The Lorcin was in a plastic bag with an evidence number. Two brass shell cases were in a separate bag. Two tiny .22 bullets were in a bag each. They were grey and very slightly distorted. One bag was marked _Intercranial #1_ and the other was marked _Intercranial #2_. They had reference numbers, and signatures.
'Is the pathologist here?' Reacher asked.
'Sure,' the counter guy said. 'He's always here.'
'I need to see him,' Reacher said. 'Right now.'
He was expecting objections, but the guy just pointed to the double doors.
'In there,' he said.
Alice hung back, but Reacher went through. At first he thought the room was empty, but then he saw a glass door in the far corner. Behind it was an office, with a man in green scrubs at a desk. He was doing paperwork. Reacher knocked on the glass. The man looked up. Mouthed _come in_. Reacher went in.
'Help you?' the guy said.
'Only two bullets in Sloop Greer?' Reacher said.
'Who are you?'
'I'm with the perp's lawyer,' Reacher said. 'She's outside.'
'The perp?'
'No, the lawyer.'
'OK,' the guy said. 'What about the bullets?'
'How many were there?'
'Two,' the guy said. 'Hell of a time getting them out.'
'Can I see the body?'
'Why?'
'I'm worried about a miscarriage of justice.'
It's a line which usually works with pathologists. They figure there's going to be a trial, they figure they'll be called on for evidence, the last thing they want is to be humiliated by the defence on cross-examination. It's bad for their scientific image. And their egos. So they prefer to get any doubts squared away beforehand.
'OK,' he said. 'It's in the freezer.'
He had another door at the back of his office which led to a dim corridor. At the end of the corridor was an insulated steel door, like a meat locker.
'Cold in there,' he said.
Reacher nodded. 'I'm glad somewhere is.'
The guy operated the handle and they went inside. The light was bright. There were fluorescent tubes all over the ceiling. There was a bank of twenty-seven stainless steel drawers on the far wall, nine across, three high. Eight of them were occupied. They had tags slipped into little receptacles on the front, the sort of thing you see on office filing cabinets. The air in the room was frosty. Reacher's breath clouded in front of him. The pathologist checked the tags and slid a drawer. It came out easily, on cantilevered runners.
'Had to take the back of his head off,' he said. 'Practically had to scoop his brains out with a soup ladle, before I found them.'
Sloop Greer was on his back and naked. He looked small and collapsed in death. His skin was grey, like unfired clay. It was hard with cold. His eyes were open, blank and staring. He had two bullet holes in his forehead, about three inches apart. They were neat holes, blue and ridged at the edges, like they had been carefully drilled there by a craftsman.
'Classic .22 gunshot wounds,' the pathologist said. 'The bullets go in OK, but they don't come out again. Too slow. Not enough power. They just rattle around in there. But they get the job done.'
Reacher closed his eyes. Then he smiled. A big, broad grin.
'That's for sure,' he said. 'They get the job done.'
There was a knock at the open door. A low sound, like soft knuckles against hard steel. Reacher opened his eyes again. Alice was standing there, shivering.
'What are you doing?' she called to him.
'What comes after quadruple-check?' he called back.
His breath hung in the air in front of him, like a shaped cloud.
'Quintuple-check,' she said. 'Why?'
'And after that?'
'Sextuple,' she said. 'Why?'
'Because we're going to be doing a whole lot of checking now.'
'Why?'
'Because there's something seriously wrong here, Alice. Come take a look.'
FOURTEEN
Alice walked slowly across the tile.
'What's wrong?' she asked.
'Tell me what you see,' Reacher said.
She dropped her eyes toward the corpse like it required a physical effort.
'Shot in the head,' she said. 'Twice.'
'How far apart are the holes?'
'Maybe three inches.'
'What else do you see?'
'Nothing,' she said.
He nodded. 'Exactly.'
'So?'
'Look closer. The holes are clean, right?'
She took a step nearer the drawer. Bent slightly from the waist.
'They look clean,' she said.
'That has implications,' he said. 'It means they're not contact wounds. A contact wound is where you put the muzzle of the gun directly against the forehead. You know what happens when you do that?'
She shook her head. Said nothing.
'First thing out of a gun barrel is an explosion of hot gas. If the muzzle was tight against the forehead, the gas punches in under the skin and then can't go anyplace, because of the bone. So it punches right back out again. It tears itself a big star-shaped hole. Looks like a starfish. Right, doc?'
The pathologist nodded. 'Star-burst splitting, we call it,' he said.
'That's absent here,' Reacher said. 'So it wasn't a contact shot. Next thing out of the barrel is flame. If it was a real close shot, two or three inches, but not a contact shot, we'd see burning of the skin. In a small ring shape.'
'Burn rim,' the pathologist said.
'That's absent, too,' Reacher said. 'Next thing out is soot. Soft, smudgy black stuff. So if it was a shot from six or eight inches, we'd see soot smudging on his forehead. Maybe a patch a couple inches wide. That's not here, either.'
'So?' Alice asked.
'Next thing out is gunpowder particles,' Reacher said. 'Little bits of unburned carbon. No gunpowder is perfect. Some of it doesn't burn. It just blasts out, in a spray. It hammers in under the skin. Tiny black dots. Tattooing, it's called. If it was a shot from a foot away, maybe a foot and a half, we'd see it. You see it?'
'No,' Alice said.
'Right. All we see is the bullet holes. Nothing else. No evidence at all to suggest they were from close range. Depends on the exact powder in the shells, but they look to me like shots from three or four feet away, absolute minimum.'
'Eight feet six inches,' the pathologist said. 'That's my estimation.'
Reacher glanced at him. 'You tested the powder?'
The guy shook his head. 'Crime scene diagrams. He was on the far side of the bed. The bed was near the window, gave him an alley two feet six inches wide on his side. He was found near the bedside table, up near the head, against the window wall. We know she wasn't next to him there, or we'd have found all that close-range stuff you just mentioned. So the nearest she _could_ have been was on the other side of the bed. At the foot end, probably. Firing across it, diagonally, according to the trajectories. He was probably retreating as far as he could get. It was a king-size bed, so my best guess is eight feet six inches, to allow for the diagonal.'
'Excellent,' Reacher said. 'You prepared to say so on the stand?'
'Sure. And that's only the theoretical minimum. Could have been more.'
'But what does it mean?' Alice asked.
'Means Carmen didn't do it,' Reacher said.
'Why not?'
'How big is a man's forehead? Five inches across and two high?'
'So?'
'No way she could have hit a target that small from eight feet plus.'
'How do you know?'
'Because I saw her shoot, the day before. First time she pulled a trigger in her life. She was hopeless. Literally hopeless. She couldn't have hit the side of a barn from eight feet plus. I told her she'd have to jam the gun in his gut and empty the magazine.'
'You're digging her grave,' Alice said. 'That sort of testimony shouldn't be volunteered.'
'She didn't do it, Alice. She couldn't have.'
'She could have gotten lucky.'
'Sure, once. But not twice. Twice means they were aimed shots. And they're close together, horizontally. He'd have started falling after the first one. Which means it was a fast double-tap. _Bang bang_ , like that, no hesitation. That's skilful shooting.'
Alice was quiet for a second. 'She could have been faking,' she said. 'You know, before. About needing to learn. She lied about everything else. Maybe she was really an expert shot, but she claimed not to be. Because she wanted you to do it for her. For other reasons.'
Reacher shook his head. 'She wasn't faking,' he said. 'All my life I've seen people shoot. Either you can or you can't. And if you can, it shows. You can't hide it. You can't unlearn it.'
Alice said nothing.
'It wasn't Carmen,' Reacher said. 'Even _I_ couldn't have done it. Not with that piece of junk she bought. Not from that distance. A fast double-tap to the head? Whoever did this is a better shooter than me.'
Alice smiled, faintly. 'And that's rare?'
'Very,' he said, unselfconsciously.
'But she confessed to it. Why would she do that?'
'I have no idea.'
Ellie wasn't sure she understood completely. She had hidden on the stairs above the foyer when her grandmother talked to the strangers. She had heard the words _new family_. She understood what they meant. And she already knew she _needed_ a new family. The Greers had told her that her daddy had died and her mommy had gone far away and wasn't ever coming back. And they had told her they didn't want to keep her with them. Which was OK with her. She didn't want to stay with them, either. They were mean. They had already sold her pony, and all the other horses, too. A big truck had come for them, very early that morning. She didn't cry. She just somehow knew it all went together. No more daddy, no more mommy, no more pony, no more horses. Everything had changed. So she went with the strangers, because she didn't know what else to do.
Then the strangers had let her talk to her mommy on the phone. Her mommy had cried, and at the end she said _be happy with your new family_. But the thing was, she wasn't sure if these strangers _were_ her new family, or if they were just _taking_ her to her new family. And she was afraid to ask. So she just kept quiet. The back of her hand was sore, where she put it in her mouth.
'It's a can of worms,' Hack Walker said. 'You know what I mean? Best not to open it at all. Things could get out of hand real quick.'
They were back in Walker's office. It was easily seventy degrees hotter than the interior of the morgue building. They were both sweating heavily.
'You understand?' Walker asked. 'It makes things worse again.'
'You think?' Alice said.
Walker nodded. 'It muddies the waters. Let's say Reacher is right, which is a stretch, frankly, because all he's got is a highly subjective opinion here. He's guessing, basically. And his guess is based on what, exactly? It's based on an impression she chose to give him beforehand, that she couldn't shoot, and we already know every _other_ impression she chose to give him beforehand was total bullshit from beginning to end. But let's say he's right, just for the sake of argument. What does that give us?'
'What?'
'A conspiracy, is what. We know she tried to rope Reacher in. Now you've got her roping somebody else in. She gets a hold of somebody else, she tells them to come to the house, she tells them where and when, she tells them where her gun is concealed, they show up, get the gun, do the deed. If it happened that way, she's instigated a conspiracy to commit murder for remuneration. Hired a killer, cold-blooded as hell. We go down that road, she's headed for the lethal injection again. Because _that_ looks a whole lot worse than a solo shot, believe me. In comparison, a solo shot looks almost benign. It looks like a crime of the moment, you know? We leave it exactly the way we got it, along with the guilty plea, I'm happy asking for a life sentence. But we start talking conspiracy, that's real evil, and we're back on track for death row.'
Alice said nothing.
'So you see what I mean?' Walker said. 'There's no net benefit. Absolutely the opposite effect. It makes things much worse for her. Plus, she already said she did it herself. Which I think is true. But if it isn't, then her confession was a calculated lie, designed to cover her ass, because she knew a conspiracy would look worse. And we'd have to react to that. We couldn't let that go. It would make us look like fools.'
Alice said nothing. Reacher just shrugged.
'So leave it alone,' Walker said. 'That's my suggestion. If it would help her, I'd look at it. But it won't. So we should leave it alone. For her sake.'
'And for your judgeship's sake,' Reacher said.
Walker nodded. 'I'm not hiding that from you.'
'You happy to leave it alone?' Alice asked. 'As a prosecutor? Somebody could be getting clean away with something.'
Walker shook his head. ' _If_ it happened the way Reacher thinks. If, if, if. If is a very big word. I got to say I think it's highly unlikely. Believe me, I'm a real enthusiastic prosecutor, but I wouldn't build a case and waste a jury's time on one person's purely subjective opinion about how well another person could shoot. Especially when that other person is as accomplished a liar as Carmen is. All we know, she's been shooting every day since she was a kid. A rough kid from some barrio in LA, certainly a rural Texas jury wouldn't see any problem in swallowing that.'
Reacher said nothing. Alice nodded again.
'OK,' she said. 'I'm not her lawyer, anyway.'
'What would you do if you were?'
She shrugged. 'I'd leave it, probably. Like you say, blundering into a conspiracy rap wouldn't help her any.'
She stood up, slowly, like it was an effort in the heat. She tapped Reacher on the shoulder. Gave him a _what-can-we-do?_ look and headed for the door. He stood up and followed her. Walker said nothing. Just watched them partway out of the room and then dropped his eyes to the old photograph of the three boys leaning on the pick-up's fender.
They crossed the street together and walked as far as the bus depot. It was fifty yards from the courthouse, fifty yards from the legal mission. It was a small, sleepy depot. No buses in it. Just an expanse of diesel-stained blacktop ringed with benches shaded from the afternoon sun by small white fibreglass roofs. There was a tiny office hut papered on the outside with schedules. It had a through-the-wall air conditioner running hard. There was a woman in it, sitting on a high stool, reading a magazine.
'Walker's right, you know,' Alice said. 'He's doing her a favour. It's a lost cause.'
Reacher said nothing.
'So where will you head?' she asked.
'First bus out,' he said. 'That's my rule.'
They stood together and read the schedules. Next departure was to Topeka, Kansas, via Oklahoma City. It was due in from Phoenix, Arizona, in a half-hour. It was making a long slow counterclockwise loop.
'Been to Topeka before?' Alice asked.
'I've been to Leavenworth,' he said. 'It's not far.'
He tapped on the glass and the woman sold him a one-way ticket. He put it in his pocket.
'Good luck, Alice,' he said. 'Four and a half years from now, I'll look for you in the Yellow Pages.'
She smiled. 'Take care, Reacher,' she said.
She stood still for a second, like she was debating whether to hug him or kiss him on the cheek, or just walk away. Then she smiled again, and just walked away. He watched her go until she was lost to sight. Then he found the shadiest bench and sat down to wait.
She still wasn't sure. They had taken her to a very nice place, like a house, with beds and everything. So maybe this _was_ her new family. But they didn't _look_ like a family. They were very busy. She thought they looked a bit like doctors. They were kind to her, but busy too, with stuff she didn't understand. Like at the doctor's office. Maybe they _were_ doctors. Maybe they knew she was upset, and they were going to make her better. She thought about it for a long time, and then she asked.
'Are you doctors?' she said.
'No,' they answered.
'Are you my new family?'
'No,' they said. 'You'll go to your new family soon.'
'When?'
'A few days, OK? But right now you stay with us.'
She thought they all looked very busy.
The bus rolled in more or less on time. It was a big Greyhound, dirty from the road, wrapped in a diesel cloud, with heat shimmering visibly from its air conditioner grilles. It stopped twenty feet from him and the driver held the engine at a loud shuddering idle. The door opened and three people got off. Reacher stood up and walked over and got on. He was the only departing passenger. The driver took his ticket.
'Two minutes, OK?' the guy said. 'I need a comfort stop.'
Reacher nodded and said nothing. Just shuffled down the aisle and found a double seat empty. It was on the left, which would face the evening sun all the way after they turned north at Abilene. But the windows were tinted dark blue and the air was cold, so he figured he'd be OK. He sat down sideways. Stretched out and rested his head against the glass. The eight spent shells in his pocket were uncomfortable against the muscle of his thigh. He hitched up and moved them through the cotton. Then he took them out and held them in his palm. Rolled them together like dice. They were warm, and they made dull metallic sounds.
_Abilene_ , he thought.
The driver climbed back in and hung off the step and looked both ways, like an old railroad guy. Then he slid into his seat and the door wheezed shut behind him.
'Wait,' Reacher called.
He stood up and shuffled forward again, all the way down the aisle.
'I changed my mind,' he said. 'I'm getting off.'
'I already cancelled your ticket,' the driver said. 'You want a refund, you'll have to mail a claim.'
'I don't want a refund,' Reacher said. 'Just let me out, OK?'
The driver looked blank, but he operated the mechanism anyway and the doors wheezed open again. Reacher stepped down into the heat and walked away. He heard the bus leave behind him. It turned right where he had turned left and he heard its noise fade and die into the distance. He walked on to the law office. Working hours elsewhere were over and it was crowded again with groups of quiet worried people, some of them talking to lawyers, some of them waiting to. Alice was at her desk at the back, talking to a woman with a baby on her knee. She looked up, surprised.
'Bus didn't come?' she asked.
'I need to ask you a legal question,' he said.
'Is it quick?'
He nodded. 'Civilian law, if some guy tells an attorney about a crime, how far can the cops press the attorney for the details?'
'It would be privileged information,' Alice said. 'Between lawyer and client. The cops couldn't press at all.'
'Can I use your phone?'
She paused a moment, puzzled. Then she shrugged. 'Sure,' she said. 'Squeeze in.'
He took a spare client chair and put it next to hers, behind the desk.
'Got phone books for Abilene?' he asked.
'Bottom drawer,' she said. 'All of Texas.'
She turned back to the woman with the baby and restarted their discussion in Spanish. He opened the drawer and found the right book. There was an information page near the front, with all the emergency services laid out in big letters. He dialled the State Police, Abilene office. A woman answered and asked how she could help him.
'I have information,' he said. 'About a crime.'
The woman put him on hold. Maybe thirty seconds later the call was picked up elsewhere. Sounded like a squad room. Other phones were ringing in the background and there was faint people noise all around.
'Sergeant Rodriguez,' a voice said.
'I have information about a crime,' Reacher said again.
'Your name, sir?'
'Chester A. Arthur,' Reacher said. 'I'm a lawyer in Pecos County.'
'OK, Mr Arthur, go ahead.'
'You guys found an abandoned automobile south of Abilene on Friday. A Mercedes Benz belonging to a lawyer called Al Eugene. He's currently listed as a missing person.'
There was the sound of a keyboard pattering.
'OK,' Rodriguez said. 'What can you tell me?'
'I have a client here who says Eugene was abducted from his car and killed very near the scene.'
'What's your client's name, sir?'
'Can't tell you that,' Reacher said. 'Privileged information. And the fact is I'm not sure I even believe him. I need you to check his story from your end. If he's making sense, then maybe I can persuade him to come forward.'
'What is he telling you?'
'He says Eugene was flagged down and put in another car. He was driven north to a concealed location on the left-hand side of the road, and then he was shot and his body was hidden.'
Alice had stopped her conversation and was staring sideways at him.
'So I want you to search the area,' Reacher said.
'We already searched the area.'
'What kind of a radius?'
'Immediate surroundings.'
'No, my guy says a mile or two north. You need to look under vegetation, in the cracks in the rock, pumping houses, anything there is. Some spot near where a vehicle could have pulled off the road.'
'A mile or two north of the abandoned car?'
'My guy says not less than one, not more than two.'
'On the left?'
'He's pretty sure,' Reacher said.
'You got a phone number?'
'I'll call you back,' Reacher said. 'An hour from now.'
He hung up. The woman with the baby was gone. Alice was still staring at him.
'What?' she said.
'We should have focused on Eugene before.'
'Why?'
'Because what's the one solid fact we've got here?'
'What?'
'Carmen didn't shoot Sloop, that's what.'
'That's an opinion, not a fact.'
'No, it's a fact, Alice. Believe me, I _know_ these things.'
She shrugged. 'OK, so?'
'So somebody else shot him. Which raises the question, why? We know Eugene is missing, and we know Sloop is dead. They were connected, lawyer and client. So let's assume Eugene is dead, too, not just missing. For the sake of argument. They were working together on a deal which sprung Sloop from jail. Some kind of a big deal, because that isn't easy. They don't hand out remissions like candy. So it must have involved some heavy-duty information. Something valuable. Big trouble for somebody. Suppose that somebody took them _both_ out, for revenge, or to stop the flow of information?'
'Where did you get this idea?'
'From Carmen, actually,' he said. 'She suggested that's how I should do it. Off Sloop and make like stopping the deal was the pretext.'
'So Carmen took her own advice.'
'No, Carmen's parallel,' Reacher said. 'She hated him, she had a motive, she's all kinds of a liar, but she didn't kill him. Somebody else did.'
'Yes, _for_ her.'
'No,' Reacher said. 'It didn't happen that way. She just got lucky. It was a parallel event. Like he was run over by a truck someplace else. Maybe she's thrilled with the result, but she didn't _cause_ it.'
'How sure are you?'
'Very sure. Any other way is ridiculous. Think about it, Alice. Anybody who shoots that well is a professional. Professionals plan ahead, at least a few days. And if she had hired a professional a few days ahead, why would she trawl around Texas looking for guys like me hitching rides? And why would she allow Sloop to be killed in her own bedroom, where she would be the number-one suspect? With her own gun?'
'So what do you think happened?'
'I think some hit team took Eugene out on Friday and covered their ass by hiding the body so it won't be found until the trail is completely cold. Then they took Sloop out on Sunday and covered their ass by making it look like Carmen did it. In her bedroom, with her own gun.'
'But she was with him. Wouldn't she have _noticed_? Wouldn't she have _said_?'
He paused. 'Maybe she was with Ellie at the time. Maybe she walked back into the bedroom and found it done. Or maybe she was in the shower. Her hair was wet when they arrested her.'
'Then she'd have heard the shots.'
'Not with that shower. It's like Niagara Falls. And a .22 pistol is quiet.'
'How do you know where they'll find Eugene's body? Assuming you're right?'
'I thought about how I would do it. They obviously had a vehicle of their own, out there in the middle of nowhere. So maybe they staged a breakdown or a flat. Flagged him down, forced him into their vehicle, drove him away. But they wouldn't want to keep him in there long. Too risky. Two or three minutes maximum, I figure, which is a mile or two from a standing start.'
'Why north? Why on the left side?'
'I'd have driven way north first. Turned back and scouted the nearside shoulder. Picked my place and measured a couple of miles backward, turned round again and set up and waited for him.'
'Conceivable,' she said. 'But the Sloop thing? That's impossible. They went down to that house? In Echo, in the middle of nowhere? Hid out and crept in? While she was in the shower?'
'I could have done it,' he said. 'And I'm assuming they're as good as me. Maybe they're better than me. They certainly shoot better.'
'You're crazy,' she said.
'Maybe,' he said.
'No, for sure,' she said. 'Because she _confessed_ to it. Why would she do that? If it was really nothing at all to do with her?'
'We'll figure that out later. First, we wait an hour.'
He left Alice with work to do and went back out into the heat. Decided he'd finally take a look at the Wild West museum. When he got there, it was closed. Too late in the day. But he could see an alley leading to an open area at the back. There was a locked gate, low enough for him to step over. Behind the buildings was a collection of rebuilt artefacts from the old days. There was a small one-cell jailhouse, and a replica of Judge Roy Bean's courthouse, and a hanging tree. The three displays made a nice direct sequence. Arrest, trial, sentence. Then there was Clay Allison's grave. It was well tended, and the headstone was handsome. Clay was his middle name. His first name was Robert. Robert Clay Allison, born 1840, died 1887. _Never killed a man that did not need killing_. Reacher had no middle name. It was Jack Reacher, plain and simple. Born 1960, not dead yet. He wondered what his headstone would look like. Probably wouldn't have one. There was nobody to arrange it.
He strolled back up the alley and stepped over the gate again. Facing him was a long low concrete building, two storeys. Retail operations on the first floor, offices above. One of them had _Albert E. Eugene, Attorney at Law_ painted on the window in old-fashioned gold letters. There were two other law firms in the building. The building was within sight of the courthouse. These were the cheap lawyers, Reacher guessed. Separated geographically from the free lawyers in Alice's row and the expensive lawyers who must be on some other street. Although Eugene had driven a Mercedes Benz. Maybe he did a lot of volume. Or maybe he was just vain and had been struggling with a heavy lease payment.
He paused at the crossroads. The sun was dropping low in the west and there were clouds stacking up on the southern horizon. There was a warm breeze on his face. It was gusting strong enough to tug at his clothes and stir dust on the sidewalk. He stood for a second and let it flatten the fabric of his shirt against his stomach. Then it died and the dull heat came back. But the clouds were still there in the south, like ragged stains on the sky.
He walked back to Alice's office. She was still at her desk. Still facing an endless stream of problems. There were people in her client chairs. A middle-aged Mexican couple. They had patient, trusting expressions on their faces. Her stack of paperwork had grown. She pointed vaguely at his chair, which was still placed next to hers. He squeezed in and sat down. Picked up the phone and dialled the Abilene number from memory. He gave his name as Chester Arthur and asked for Sergeant Rodriguez.
He was on hold a whole minute. Then Rodriguez picked up and Reacher knew right away they had found Eugene's body. There was a lot of urgency in the guy's voice.
'We need your client's name, Mr Arthur,' Rodriguez said.
'What did your people find?' Reacher asked.
'Exactly what you said, sir. Mile and a half north, on the left, in a deep limestone crevasse. Shot once through the right eye.'
'Was it a .22?'
'No way. Not according to what I'm hearing. Nine-millimetre, at least. Some big messy cannon. Most of his head is gone.'
'You got an estimated time of death?'
'Tough question, in this heat. And they say the coyotes got to him, ate up some of the parts the pathologist likes to work with. But if somebody said Friday, I don't think we'd argue any.'
Reacher said nothing.
'I need some names,' Rodriguez said.
'My guy's not the doer,' Reacher said. 'I'll talk to him and maybe he'll call you.'
Then he hung up before Rodriguez could start arguing. Alice was staring at him again. So were her clients. Clearly they spoke enough English to follow the conversation.
'Which President was Chester Arthur?' Alice asked.
'After Garfield, before Grover Cleveland,' Reacher replied. 'One of two from Vermont.'
'Who was the other?'
'Calvin Coolidge.'
'So they found Eugene,' she said.
'Sure did.'
'So now what?'
'Now we go warn Hack Walker.'
' _Warn_ him?'
Reacher nodded. 'Think about it, Alice. Maybe what we've got here is two out of two, but I think it's more likely to be two out of three. They were a threesome, Hack and Al and Sloop. Carmen said they all worked together on the deal. She said Hack brokered it with the feds. So Hack knew what they knew, for sure. So he could be next.'
Alice turned to her clients.
'Sorry, got to go,' she said, in English.
Hack Walker was packing up for the day. He was on his feet with his jacket on and he was latching his briefcase closed. It was after six o'clock and his office windows were growing dim with dusk. They told him that Eugene was dead and watched the colour drain out of his face. His skin literally contracted and puckered under a mask of sweat. He clawed his way round his desk and dumped himself down in his chair. He said nothing for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly.
'I guess I always knew,' he said. 'But I was, you know, hoping.'
He turned to look down at the photograph.
'I'm very sorry,' Reacher said.
'Do they know why?' Walker asked. 'Or who?'
'Not yet.'
Walker paused again. 'Why did they tell you about it before me?'
'Reacher figured out where they should look,' Alice said. ' _He_ told _them_ , effectively.'
Then she went straight into his two-for-three theory. The deal, the dangerous knowledge. The warning. Walker sat still and listened to it. His colour came back, slowly. He stayed quiet, thinking hard. Then he shook his head.
'Can't be right,' he said. 'Because the deal was really nothing at all. Sloop caved in and undertook to pay the taxes and the penalties. That was all. Nothing more. He got desperate, couldn't stand the jail time. It happens a lot. Al contacted the IRS, made the offer, they didn't bat an eye. It's routine. It was handled at a branch office. By junior grade personnel. That's how routine it was. The federal prosecutor needed to sign off on it, which is where I came in. I hustled it through, is all, a little faster than it might have gone without me. You know, the old boys' club. It was a routine IRS matter. And believe me, nobody gets killed over a routine IRS matter.'
He shook his head again. Then he opened his eyes wide and went very still.
'I want you to leave now,' he said.
Alice nodded. 'We're very sorry for your loss. We know you were friends.'
But Walker just looked confused, like that wasn't what he was worrying about.
'What?' Reacher said.
'We shouldn't talk any more, is what,' Walker said.
'Why not?'
'Because we're going around in a circle, and we're finishing up in a place where we don't want to be.'
'We are?'
'Think about it, guys. Nobody gets killed over a routine IRS matter. Or do they? Sloop and Al were fixing to take the trust money away from Carmen and give most of it to the government. Now Sloop and Al are dead. Two plus two makes four. Her motive is getting bigger and better all the time. We keep talking like this, I've _got_ to think conspiracy. Two deaths, not one. No choice, I've got to. And I don't want to do that.'
'There was no conspiracy,' Reacher said. 'If she'd already hired people, why did she pick me up?'
Walker shrugged. 'To confuse the issue? Distance herself?'
'Is she _that_ smart?'
'I think she is.'
'So prove it. Show us she hired somebody.'
'I can't do that.'
'Yes, you can. You've got her bank records. Show us the payment.'
'The payment?'
'You think these people work for free?'
Walker made a face. Took keys from his pocket and unlocked a drawer in his desk. Lifted out the pile of financial information. _Greer Non-Discretionary Trust #1_ through _#5_. Reacher held his breath. Walker went through them, page by page. Then he squared them together again and reversed them on the desk. His face was blank.
Alice leaned forward and picked them up. Leafed through, scanning the fourth column from the left, which was the debit column. There were plenty of debits. But they were all small and random. Nothing bigger than two hundred and ninety-seven dollars. Several below a hundred.
'Add up the last month,' Reacher said.
She scanned back.
'Nine hundred, round figures,' she said.
Reacher nodded. 'Even if she hoarded it, nine hundred bucks doesn't buy you much. Certainly doesn't buy you somebody who can operate the way we've seen.'
Walker said nothing.
'We need to go talk to her,' Reacher said.
'We can't,' Walker said. 'She's on the road, headed for the penitentiary.'
'She didn't do it,' Reacher said. 'She didn't do anything. She's completely innocent.'
'So why did she confess?'
Reacher closed his eyes. Sat still for a moment.
'She was forced to,' he said. 'Somebody got to her.'
'Who?'
Reacher opened his eyes. 'I don't know who,' he said. 'But we can find out. Get the bailiff's log from downstairs. See who came to visit her.'
Walker's face was still blank and sweaty. But he picked up the phone and dialled an internal number. Asked for the visitor's log to be brought up immediately. Then they waited in silence. Three minutes later they heard the sound of heavy footsteps in the secretarial pen and the bailiff came in through the office door. It was the day guy. He was breathing hard after running up the stairs. He was carrying a thick book in his hand.
Walker took it from him and opened it up. Scanned through it quickly and reversed it on the desk. Used his finger to point. Carmen Greer was logged in during the early hours of Monday morning. She was logged out two hours ago, into the custody of the Texas Department of Correction. In between she had received one visitor, twice. Nine o'clock on Monday morning and again on Tuesday at noon, the same Assistant District Attorney had gone down to see her.
'Preliminary interview, and then the confession,' Walker said.
There were no other entries at all.
'Is this right?' Reacher asked.
The bailiff nodded. 'Guaranteed,' he said.
Reacher looked at the log again. The first ADA interview had lasted two minutes. Clearly Carmen had refused to say a word. The second interview had lasted twelve minutes. After that she had been escorted upstairs for the videotape.
'Nobody else?' he asked.
'There were phone calls,' the bailiff said.
'When?'
'All day Monday, and Tuesday morning.'
'Who was calling her?'
'Her lawyer.'
'Her _lawyer_?' Alice said.
The guy nodded. 'It was a big pain in the ass,' he said. 'I had to keep bringing her in and out to the phone.'
'Who was the lawyer?' Alice asked.
'We're not allowed to ask, ma'am. It's a confidentiality thing. Lawyer discussions are secret.'
'Man or woman?'
'It was a man.'
'Hispanic?'
'I don't think so. He sounded like a regular guy. His voice was a little muffled. I think it was a bad phone line.'
'Same guy every time?'
'I think so.'
There was silence in the office. Walker nodded vaguely and the bailiff took it for a dismissal. They heard him walk out through the secretarial pen. They heard the lobby door close behind him.
'She didn't tell us she was represented,' Walker said. 'She told us she didn't _want_ representation.'
'She told me the same thing,' Alice said.
'We need to know who this person was,' Reacher said. 'We need to get the phone company to trace the calls.'
Walker shook his head. 'Can't do it. Legal discussions are privileged.'
Reacher stared at him. 'You really think it was a _lawyer_?'
'Don't you?'
'Of course not. It was some guy, threatening her, forcing her to lie. Think about it, Walker. First time your ADA saw her, she wouldn't say a word. Twenty-seven hours later, she's confessing. Only thing that happened in between was a bunch of calls from this guy.'
'But what kind of threat could make her say that?'
The killing crew was uneasy in its new role as babysitter. Each member felt exactly the same way, each for the exact same reasons. Holding a child hostage was not a normal part of their expertise. Taking her in the first place had been. That was a fairly standard operation, based as always on lure and deception. The woman and the tall fair man had gone to the Red House as a pair, because they figured that would match the public's perception of how social workers like to operate. They had arrived in the big official-looking sedan and used a brisk professional manner. They had mixed it with a generous helping of pious do-gooder sanctimony, as if they were desperately concerned with the child's welfare above all else. They had a thick wad of bogus papers to display. The papers looked exactly like Family Services warrants and relevant authorities from state agencies. But the grandmother hardly even looked at them. She offered no resistance at all. It struck them as unnatural. She just handed the kid over, as if she was real glad about it.
The kid put up no resistance, either. She was very earnest and silent and contemplative about the whole thing. Like she was trying to be on her best behaviour. Like she was trying to please these new adults. So they just put her in the car and drove her away. No tears, no screaming, no tantrums. It went well, all things considered. Very well. About as effortless as the Al Eugene operation.
But then they departed from normality. Radically. Standard practice would have been to drive straight to a scouted location and pull the triggers. Conceal the body and then get the hell out. But this task was different. They had to keep her hidden. And alive and unharmed. At least for a spell. Maybe days and days. It was something they had never done before. And professionals get uneasy with things they've never done before. They always do. That's the nature of professionalism. Professionals feel best when they stick to what they know.
'Call Family Services,' Reacher said. 'Right now.'
Hack Walker just stared at him.
'You asked the question,' Reacher said. 'What kind of a threat could make her confess to something she didn't do? Don't you see? They must have gotten her kid.'
Walker stared a beat longer, frozen. Then he wrestled himself into action and unlocked another drawer and rattled it open. Lifted out a heavy black binder. Opened it up and thumbed through and grabbed his phone and dialled a number. There was no answer. He dabbed the cradle and dialled another. Some kind of an evening emergency contact. It was picked up and he asked the question, using Ellie's full name, Mary Ellen Greer. There was a long pause. Then an answer. Walker listened. Said nothing. Just put the phone down, very slowly and carefully, like it was made out of glass.
'They never heard of her,' he said.
Silence. Walker closed his eyes, and then opened them again.
'OK,' he said. 'Resources are going to be a problem. State Police, of course. And the FBI, because this is a kidnap. But we've got to move immediately. Speed is absolutely paramount here. It always is, with kidnap cases. They could be taking her anywhere. So I want you two to go down to Echo, right now, get the full story from Rusty. Descriptions and everything.'
'Rusty won't talk to us,' Reacher said. 'She's too hostile. What about the Echo sheriff?'
'That guy is useless. He's probably drunk right now. You'll have to do it.'
'Waste of time,' Reacher said.
Walker opened another drawer and took two chromium stars from a box. Tossed them onto the desk.
'Raise your right hands,' he said. 'Repeat after me.'
He mumbled his way through some kind of an oath. Reacher and Alice repeated it back, as far as they could catch it. Walker nodded.
'Now you're sheriff's deputies,' he said. 'Valid throughout Echo County. Rusty will _have_ to talk to you.'
Reacher just stared at him.
'What?' Walker said.
'You can still do that here? Deputize people?'
'Sure I can,' Walker said. 'Just like the Wild West. Now get going, OK? I've got a million calls to make.'
Reacher took his chromium star and stood up, an accredited law enforcement official again for the first time in four and a quarter years. Alice stood up alongside him.
'Meet back here directly,' Walker called. 'And good luck.'
Eight minutes later they were in the yellow VW again, heading south toward the Red House for the second time that day.
The woman took the call. She let the phone ring four times while she got the voice-altering device out of her bag and switched it on. But she didn't need it. She didn't need to talk at all. She just listened, because it was a one-sided message, long and complex but basically clear and concise and unambiguous, and the whole thing was repeated twice. When it was over, she hung up the phone and put the electronics back in her bag.
'It's tonight,' she said.
'What is?' the tall man asked.
'The supplementary job,' she said. 'The Pecos thing. Seems like the situation up there is unravelling slightly. They found Eugene's body.'
'Already?'
'Shit,' the dark man said.
'Yes, shit,' the woman said. 'So we move on the supplementary right away, tonight, before things get any worse.'
'Who's the target?' the tall man asked.
'His name is Jack Reacher. Some drifter, ex-military. I've got a description. There's a girl lawyer in the picture, too. She'll need attention as well.'
'We do them simultaneous with this baby-sitting gig?'
The woman shrugged. 'Like we always said, we keep the babysitting going as long as possible, but we reserve the right to terminate when necessary.'
The men looked at each other. Ellie watched them from the bed.
FIFTEEN
Reacher was not good company on the ride south. He didn't talk at all for the first hour and a half. Evening dark had fallen fast and he kept the VW's dome light on and studied the maps from the glove compartment. In particular he concentrated on a large-scale topographical sheet that showed the southern part of Echo County. The county boundary was a completely straight line running east to west. At its closest point, it was fifty miles from the Rio Grande. That made no sense to him.
'I don't understand why she lied about the diamond,' he said.
Alice shrugged. She was pushing the little car as fast as it was willing to go.
'She lied about everything,' she said.
'The ring was different,' he said.
'Different how?'
'A different sort of lie. Like apples are different from oranges.'
'I don't follow.'
'The ring is the only thing I can't explain to myself.'
'The _only_ thing?'
'Everything else is coherent, but the ring is a problem.'
She drove on, another mile. The power line poles came and went, flashing through the headlight beams for a split second each.
'You know what's going on, don't you?' she said.
'You ever done computer-aided design?' he asked.
'No,' she said.
'Me neither.'
'So?'
'Do you know what it is?'
She shrugged again. 'Vaguely, I guess.'
'They can build a whole house or car or whatever, right there on the computer screen. They can paint it, decorate it, look at it. If it's a house, they can go _in_ it, walk around. They can rotate it, look at the front, look at the back. If it's a car, they can see how it looks in daylight and in the dark. They can tilt it up and down, spin it around, examine it from every angle. They can crash it and see how it holds up. It's like a real thing, except it isn't. I guess it's a _virtual_ thing.'
'So?' she said again.
'I can see this whole situation in my mind, like a computer design. Inside and out, up and down. From every angle. Except for the ring. The ring screws it up.'
'You want to explain that?'
'No point,' he said. 'Until I figure it out.'
'Is Ellie going to be OK?'
'I hope so. That's why we're making this trip.'
'You think the grandmother can help us?'
He shrugged. 'I doubt it.'
'So how is this trip helping Ellie?'
He said nothing. Just opened the glove compartment and put the maps back. Took out the Heckler & Koch handgun. Clicked out the magazine and checked the load. _Never assume_. But it still held its full complement of ten shells. He put the magazine back in and jacked the first round into the chamber. Then he cocked the pistol and locked it. Eased up off the passenger seat and slipped it into his pocket.
'You think we're going to need that?' she asked.
'Sooner or later,' he said. 'You got more ammo in your bag?'
She shook her head. 'I never thought I'd actually _use_ it.'
He said nothing.
'You OK?' she asked.
'Feeling good,' he said. 'Maybe like you did during that big trial, before the guy refused to pay.'
She nodded at the wheel. 'It was a good feeling.'
'That's your thing, right?'
'I guess it is.'
'This is my thing,' he said. 'This is what I'm built for. The thrill of the chase. I'm an investigator, Alice, always was, always will be. I'm a _hunter_. And when Walker gave me that badge my head started working.'
'You know what's going on, don't you?' she asked again.
'Aside from the diamond ring.'
'Tell me.'
He said nothing.
'Tell me,' she said again.
'Did you ever ride a horse?'
'No,' she said. 'I'm a city girl. Openest space I ever saw was the median strip in the middle of Park Avenue.'
'I just rode one with Carmen. First time ever.'
'So?'
'They're very tall. You're way up there in the air.'
'So?' she said again.
'You ever ride a bike?'
'In New York City?'
'Inline skating?'
'A little, back when it was cool.'
'You ever fall?'
'Once, pretty badly.'
He nodded. 'Tell me about that meal you made for me.'
'What about it?'
'Home-made, right?'
'Sure.'
'You weighed out the ingredients?'
'You have to.'
'So you've got a scale in your kitchen?'
'Sure,' she said again.
'The scales of justice,' he said.
'Reacher, what the hell are you talking about?'
He glanced to his left. The red picket fence was racing backward through the edge of her headlight beams.
'We're here,' he said. 'I'll tell you later.'
She slowed and turned in under the gate and bumped across the yard.
'Face it toward the motor barn,' he said. 'And leave the headlights on. I want to take a look at that old pick-up truck.'
'OK,' she said.
She coasted a yard or two and hauled on the steering wheel until the headlight beams washed into the right-hand end of the barn. They lit up half of the new pick-up, half of the Jeep Cherokee, and all of the old pick-up between them.
'Stay close to me,' he said.
They got out of the car. The night air felt suddenly hot and damp. Different from before. It was cloudy and there were disturbed insects floating everywhere. But the yard was quiet. No sound. They walked over together for a better look at the abandoned truck. It was some kind of a Chevrolet, maybe twenty years old, but still a recognizable ancestor of the newer truck alongside it. It had bulbous fenders and dulled paint and a roll bar built into the load bed. It must have had a million miles on it. Probably hadn't been started in a decade. The springs sagged and the tyres were flat and the rubber was perished by the relentless heat.
'So?' Alice said.
'I think it's the truck in the photograph,' Reacher said. 'The one in Walker's office? Him and Sloop and Eugene leaning on the fender?'
'Trucks all look the same to me,' she said.
'Sloop had the same photograph.'
'Is that significant?'
He shrugged. 'They were good friends.'
They turned away. Alice ducked back into the VW and killed the lights. Then he led her to the foot of the porch steps. Up to the main entrance. He knocked. Waited. Bobby Greer opened the door. Stood there, surprised.
'So you came home,' Reacher said.
Bobby scowled, like he had already heard it. 'My buddies took me out,' he said. 'To help with the grieving process.'
Reacher opened his palm to show off the chromium star. _The badge flip_. It felt good. Not quite as good as flashing a United States Army Criminal Investigation Division credential, but it had an effect on Bobby. It stopped him closing the door again.
'Police,' Reacher said. 'We need to see your mother.'
'Police? You?'
'Hack Walker just deputized us. Valid throughout Echo County. Where's your mother?'
Bobby paused a beat. Leaned forward and glanced up at the night sky and literally sniffed the air.
'Storm's rolling in,' he said. 'It's coming now. From the south.'
'Where's your mother, Bobby?'
Bobby paused again. 'Inside,' he said.
Reacher led Alice past Bobby into the red foyer with the rifles and the mirror. It was a degree or two cooler inside the house. The old air conditioner was running hard. It thumped and rattled patiently, somewhere upstairs. They walked through the foyer and into the parlour at the back. Rusty Greer was sitting at the table in the same chair as the first time he had seen her. She was wearing the same style of clothes. Tight jeans and a fringed blouse. Her hair was lacquered up into a halo as hard as a helmet.
'We're here on official business, Mrs Greer,' Reacher said. He showed her the badge in his palm. 'We need some answers.'
'Or what, big man?' Rusty said. 'You going to arrest me?'
Reacher pulled out a chair and sat opposite her. Just looked at her.
'I've done nothing wrong,' she said.
Reacher shook his head. 'As a matter of fact, you've done everything wrong.'
'Like what?'
'Like, my grandmother would have died before she let her grandchildren get taken away. Literally. Over her dead body, she'd have said, and she'd have damn well meant every word.'
Silence for a second. Just the endless tick of the fan.
'It was for the child's own good,' Rusty said. 'And I had no choice. They had papers.'
'You given grandchildren away before?'
'No.'
'So how do you know they were the _right_ papers?'
Rusty just shrugged. Said nothing.
'Did you check?'
'How could I?' Rusty said. 'And they looked right. All full of big words, aforementioned, hereinafter, the State of Texas.'
'They were fakes,' Reacher said. 'It was a kidnap, Mrs Greer. It was coercion. They took your granddaughter to threaten your daughter-in-law with.'
He watched her face, for dawning realization, for guilt or shame or fear or remorse. There was some expression there. He wasn't exactly sure what it was.
'So we need descriptions,' he said. 'How many were there?'
She said nothing.
'How many people, Mrs Greer?'
'Two people. A man and a woman.'
'White?'
'Yes.'
'What did they look like?'
Rusty shrugged again. 'Ordinary,' she said. 'Normal. Like you would expect. Like social workers. From a city. They had a big car.'
'Hair? Eyes? Clothes?'
'Fair hair, I think. Both of them. Cheap suits. The woman wore a skirt. Blue eyes, I think. The man was tall.'
'What about their car?'
'I don't know about cars. It was a big sedan. But kind of ordinary. Not a Cadillac.'
'Colour?'
'Grey or blue, maybe. Not dark.'
'You got any humble pie in the kitchen?'
'Why?'
'Because I should cram it down your throat until it chokes you. Those fair-haired white people with the blue eyes are the ones who killed Al Eugene. And you gave your own granddaughter to them.'
She stared at him. 'Killed? Al is dead?'
'Two minutes after they took him out of his car.'
She went pale and her mouth started working. She said _what about_ , and then stopped. And again, _what about_. She couldn't add the word _Ellie_.
'Not yet,' Reacher said. 'That's my guess. And my hope. Ought to be _your_ hope, too, because if they hurt her, you know what I'm going to do?'
She didn't answer. Just clamped her lips and shook her head from side to side.
'I'm going to come back down here and break your spine. I'm going to stand you up and snap it like a rotten twig.'
They made her take a bath, which was awful, because one of the men watched her do it. He was quite short and had black hair on his head and his arms. He stood inside the bathroom door and watched her all the time she was in the tub. Her mommy had told her, _never let anybody see you undressed, especially not a man_. And he was right there watching her. And she had no pyjamas to put on afterwards. She hadn't brought any. She hadn't brought _anything_.
'You don't need pyjamas,' the man said. 'It's too hot for pyjamas.'
He stood there by the door, watching her. She dried herself with a small white towel. She needed to pee, but she wasn't going to let him watch her do _that_. She had to squeeze very near him to get out of the room. Then the other two watched her all the way to the bed. The other man, and the woman. They were horrible. They were _all_ horrible. She got into the bed and pulled the covers up over her head and tried hard not to cry.
'What now?' Alice asked.
'Back to Pecos,' Reacher said. 'I want to keep on the move. And we've got a lot of stuff to do tonight. But go slow, OK? I need time to think.'
She drove out to the gate and turned north into the darkness. Switched the fan on high to blow the night heat away.
'Think about what?' Alice asked.
'About where Ellie is.'
'Why do you think it was the same people as killed Eugene?'
'It's a deployment issue,' he said. 'I can't see anybody using a separate hit team and kidnap team. Not down here in the middle of nowhere. So I think it's one team. Either a hit team moonlighting on the kidnap, or a kidnap team moonlighting on the hits. Probably the former, because the way they did Eugene was pretty expert. If that was moonlighting, I'd hate to see them do what they're _really_ good at.'
'All they did was shoot him. Anybody could do that.'
'No, they couldn't. They got him to stop the car, they talked him into theirs. They kept him quiet throughout. That's really good technique, Alice. Harder than you can imagine. Then they shot him through the eye. That means something, too.'
'What?'
He shrugged. 'It's a tiny target. And in a situation like that, it's a snap shot. You raise the gun, you fire. _One, two_. No rational reason to pick such a tiny target. It's a kind of exuberance. Not exactly showing off, as such. More like just celebrating your own skill and precision. Like revelling in it. It's a joy thing.'
Silence in the car. Just the hum of the motor and the whine of the tyres.
'And now they've got the kid,' Alice said.
'And they're uneasy about it, because they're moonlighting. They're used to each other alone. They're accustomed to their normal procedures. Having a live kid around makes them worried about being static and visible.'
'They'll look like a family. A man, a woman, a little girl.'
'No, I think there's more than two of them.'
'Why?'
'Because if it was me, I'd want three. In the service, we used three. Basically a driver, a shooter and a back-watcher.'
'You shot people? The military police?'
He shrugged. 'Sometimes. You know, things better not brought to trial.'
She was quiet for a long moment. He saw her debating whether to hitch an inch farther away from him. Then he saw her decide to stay where she was.
'So why didn't you do it for Carmen?' she asked. 'If you've done it before?'
'She asked me the same question. My answer is, I really don't know.'
She was quiet again, another mile.
'Why are they holding Ellie?' she said. 'I mean, _still_ holding her? They already coerced the confession. So what's still to gain?'
'You're the lawyer,' he said. 'You have to figure that one out. When does it become set in stone? You know, irrevocable?'
'Never, really. A confession can be retracted any time. But in practice, I guess if she answered _nolo contendere_ to the grand jury indictment, that would be regarded as a milestone.'
'And how soon could that happen?'
'Tomorrow, easily. Grand jury sits more or less permanently. It would take ten minutes, maybe a quarter of an hour.'
'I thought justice ground real slow in Texas.'
'Only if you plead not guilty.'
Silence again, for many miles. They passed through the crossroads hamlet with the school and the gas station and the diner. It whipped backward through the headlight beams, three short seconds end to end. The sky up ahead was still clear. The stars were still visible. But the clouds were building fast behind them, in the south.
'So maybe tomorrow they'll let her go,' Alice said.
'And maybe tomorrow they won't. They'll be worried she could make the ID. She's a smart kid. She sits quiet, watching and thinking all the time.'
'So what do we do?'
'We try to figure out where she is.'
He opened the glove compartment and took out the maps again. Found a large-scale plan of Pecos County and spread it on his knee. Reached up and clicked on the dome light.
'How?' Alice asked. 'I mean, where do you start?'
'I've done this before,' Reacher said. 'Years and years, I hunted deserters and AWOLs. You train yourself to think like them, and you usually find them.'
'That easy?'
'Sometimes,' he said.
Silence in the speeding car.
'But they could be anywhere,' Alice said. 'I mean, there must be a million hide-outs. Abandoned farmsteads, ruined buildings.'
'No, I think they're using motels,' Reacher said.
'Why?'
'Because appearances are very important to them. Part of their technique. They suckered Al Eugene somehow, and they looked plausible to Rusty Greer, not that she cared too much. So they need running water and showers and closets and working electricity for hairdryers and shavers.'
'There are hundreds of motels here,' she said. 'Thousands, probably.'
He nodded. 'And they're moving around, almost certainly. A different place every day. Basic security.'
'So how do we find the right one tonight?'
He held the map where it caught the light.
'We find it in our heads. Think like them, figure out what _we'd_ do. Then that should be the same thing as what _they'd_ do.'
'Hell of a gamble.'
'Maybe, maybe not.'
'So are we going to start now?'
'No, we're going back to your office now.'
'Why?'
'Because I don't like frontal assaults. Not against people this good, not with a kid in the crossfire.'
'So what do we do?'
'We divide and rule. We lure two of them out. Maybe we capture a tongue.'
'A tongue? What's that?'
'An enemy prisoner who'll talk.'
'How do we do that?'
'We decoy them. They're already aware we know about them. So they'll come for us, try a little damage control.'
'They _know_ we know? But how?'
'Somebody just told them.'
'Who?'
Reacher didn't reply. Just stared down at the map. Looked at the faint red lines that represented roads meandering across thousands of empty miles. Closed his eyes and tried hard to imagine what they looked like in reality.
Alice parked in the lot behind the law offices. She had a key to the rear door. There were a lot of shadows, and Reacher was very vigilant as they walked. But they made it inside OK. The old store was deserted and dusty and silent and hot. The air conditioner had been turned off at the end of the day. Reacher stood still and listened for the inaudible quiver of people waiting. It's a primeval sensation, received and understood far back in the brain. It wasn't there.
'Call Walker and give him an update,' he said. 'Tell him we're here.'
He made her sit back to back with him at somebody else's desk in the centre of the room, so he could watch the front entrance while she watched the rear. He rested the pistol in his lap with the safety off. Then he dialled Sergeant Rodriguez's number in Abilene. Rodriguez was still on duty, and he sounded unhappy about it.
'We checked with the Bar Association,' he said. 'There are no lawyers licensed in Texas called Chester A. Arthur.'
'I'm from Vermont,' Reacher said. 'I'm volunteering down here, pro bono.'
'Like hell you are.'
The line went quiet.
'I'll deal,' Reacher said. 'Names, in exchange for conversation.'
'With who?'
'With you, maybe. How long have you been a Ranger?'
'Seventeen years.'
'How much do you know about the Border Patrol?'
'Enough, I guess.'
'You prepared to give me a straight yes–no answer? No comebacks?'
'What's the question?'
'You recall the Border Patrol investigation twelve years ago?'
'Maybe.'
'Was it a whitewash?'
Rodriguez paused a long moment, and then he answered, with a single word.
'I'll call you back,' Reacher said.
He hung up and turned and spoke over his shoulder to Alice. 'You get Walker?' he asked.
'He's up to speed,' she said. 'He wants us to wait for him here, for when he's through with the FBI.'
Reacher shook his head. 'Can't wait here. Too obvious. We need to stay on the move. We'll go to him, and then we'll get back on the road.'
She paused a beat. 'Are we in serious danger?'
'Nothing we can't handle,' he said.
She said nothing.
'You worried?' he asked.
'A little,' she said. 'A lot, actually.'
'You can't be,' he said. 'I'm going to need your help.'
'Why was the lie about the ring different?'
'Because everything else is hearsay. But I found out for myself the ring wasn't a fake. Direct personal discovery, not hearsay. Feels very different.'
'I don't see how it's important.'
'It's important because I've got a whole big theory going and the lie about the ring screws it up like crazy.'
'Why do you want to believe her so much?'
'Because she had no money with her.'
'What's the big theory?'
'Remember that Balzac quotation? And Marcuse?'
Alice nodded.
'I've got another one,' Reacher said. 'Something Ben Franklin once wrote.'
'What are you, a walking encyclopedia?'
'I remember stuff I read, is all. And remember something Bobby Greer said, too, about armadillos.'
She just looked at him. 'You're crazy,' she said.
He nodded. 'It's only a theory. It needs to be tested. But we can do that.'
'How?'
'We just wait and see who comes for us.'
She said nothing.
'Let's go check in with Walker,' he said.
They walked through the heat to the courthouse building. There was a breeze again, blowing in from the south. It felt damp and urgent. Walker was on his own in his office, looking very tired. His desk was a mess of phone books and paper.
'Well, it's started,' he said. 'Biggest thing you ever saw. FBI and State Police, roadblocks everywhere, helicopters in the air, more than a hundred and fifty people on the ground. But there's a storm coming in, which ain't going to help.'
'Reacher thinks they're holed up in a motel,' Alice said.
Walker nodded, grimly. 'If they are, they'll find them. Manhunt like this, it's going to be pretty relentless.'
'You need us any more?' Reacher asked.
Walker shook his head. 'We should leave it to the professionals now. I'm going home, grab a couple hours' rest.'
Reacher looked around the office. The door, the floor, the windows, the desk, the filing cabinets.
'I guess we'll do the same thing,' he said. 'We'll go to Alice's place. Call us if you need us. Or if you get any news, OK?'
Walker nodded. 'I will,' he said. 'I promise.'
'We'll go as FBI again,' the woman said. 'It's a no-brainer.'
'All of us?' the driver asked. 'What about the kid?'
The woman paused. She had to go, because she was the shooter. And if she had to split the team two and one, she wanted the tall guy with her, not the driver.
'You stay with the kid,' she said.
There was a moment's silence.
'Abort horizon?' the driver asked.
It was their standard operating procedure. Whenever the team was split, the woman set an abort horizon. Which meant that you waited until the time had passed, and then, if the team wasn't together again, you got the hell out, every man for himself.
'Four hours, OK?' the woman said. 'Done and dusted.'
She stared at him a second longer, eyebrows raised, to make sure he understood the implication of her point. Then she knelt and unzipped the heavy valise.
'So let's do it,' she said.
They did the exact same things they had done for Al Eugene, except they did them a whole lot faster because the Crown Vic was parked in the motel's lot, not hidden in a dusty turnout miles from anywhere. The lot was dimly lit and mostly empty, and there was nobody around, but it still wasn't a secure feeling. They pulled the wheel covers off and threw them in the trunk. They attached the communications antennas to the rear window and the trunk lid. They zipped blue jackets over their shirts. They loaded up with spare ammunition clips. They squared the souvenir ballcaps on their heads. They checked the loads in their nine-millimetre pistols and racked the slides and clicked the safety catches and jammed the guns in their pockets. The tall fair man slipped into the driver's seat. The woman paused outside the motel room door.
'Four hours,' she said again. 'Done and dusted.'
The driver nodded and closed the door behind her. Glanced over at the kid in the bed. _Done and dusted_ meant _leave nothing at all behind, especially live witnesses_.
Reacher took the Heckler & Koch and the maps of Texas and the FedEx packet out of the VW and carried them into Alice's house, straight through the living room and into the kitchen area. It was still and cool inside. And dry. The central air was running hard. He wondered for a second what her utility bills must be like.
'Where's the scale?' he asked.
She pushed past him and squatted down and opened a cupboard. Used two hands and lifted a kitchen scale onto the countertop. It was a big piece of equipment. It was new, but it looked old. A retro design. It had a big white upright face the size of a china plate, like the speedometer on an old-fashioned sedan. It was faced with a bulbous plastic window with a chromium bezel. There was a red pointer behind the window and large numbers around the circumference. A manufacturer's name and a printed warning: _Not Legal For Trade_.
'Is it accurate?' he asked.
Alice shrugged.
'I think so,' she said. 'The nut roast comes out OK.'
There was a chromium bowl resting in a cradle above the dial. He tapped on it with his finger and the pointer bounced up to a pound and then back down to zero. He took the magazine out of the Heckler & Koch and laid the empty gun in the bowl. It made a light metallic sound. The pointer spun up to two pounds and six ounces. Not an especially light weapon. About right, he figured. His memory told him the catalogue weight was in the region of forty-three ounces, with an empty magazine.
He put the gun back together and opened cupboards until he found a store of food. He lifted out an unopened bag of granulated sugar. It was in a gaudy yellow packet that said _5lbs_ on the side.
'What are you doing?' Alice asked.
'Weighing things,' he said.
He stood the sugar upright in the chromium bowl. The pointer spun up to five pounds exactly. He put the sugar back in the cupboard and tried a cellophane-wrapped packet of chopped nuts. The pointer read two pounds. He looked at the label on the packet and saw _2lbs_.
'Good enough,' he said.
He folded the maps and laid them across the top of the bowl. They weighed one pound and three ounces. He took them off and put the nuts back on. Still two pounds. He put the nuts back in the cupboard and tried the FedEx packet. It weighed one pound and one ounce. He added the maps and the pointer inched up to two pounds and four ounces. Added the loaded gun on top and the pointer jerked around to five pounds and three ounces. If he had wanted to, he could have calculated the weight of the bullets.
'OK, let's go,' he said. 'But we need gas. Long ride ahead. And maybe you should get out of that dress. You got something more active?'
'I guess,' she said, and headed for the stairs.
'You got a screwdriver?' he called after her.
'Under the sink,' she called back.
He bent down and found a brightly coloured toolbox in the cupboard. It was made out of plastic and looked like a lunch pail. He clicked it open and selected a medium-sized screwdriver with a clear yellow handle. A minute later Alice came back down the stairs wearing baggy khaki cargo pants and a black T-shirt with the sleeves torn off at the shoulder seams.
'OK?' she asked.
'Me and Judith,' he said. 'Got a lot in common.'
She smiled and said nothing.
'I'm assuming your car is insured,' he said. 'It could get damaged tonight.'
She said nothing. Just locked up her door and followed him out to the VW. She drove out of her complex, with Reacher craning his neck, watching the shadows. She got gas at a neon-bright all-night station out on the El Paso road. Reacher paid for it.
'OK, back to the courthouse,' he said. 'Something I want from there.'
She said nothing. Just turned the car and headed east. Parked in the lot behind the building. They walked round and tried the street door. It was locked up tight.
'So what now?' she asked.
It was hot on the sidewalk. Still up there around ninety degrees, and damp. The breeze had died again. There were clouds filling the sky.
'I'm going to kick it in,' he said.
'There's probably an alarm.'
'There's definitely an alarm. I checked.'
'So?'
'So I'm going to set it off.'
'Then the cops will come.'
'I'm counting on it.'
'You want to get us arrested?'
'They won't come right away. We've got three or four minutes, maybe.'
He took two paces back and launched forward and smashed the flat of his sole above the handle. The wood splintered and sagged open a half-inch, but held. He kicked again and the door crashed back and bounced off the corridor wall. A blue strobe high up outside started flashing and an urgent electric bell started ringing. It was about as loud as he had expected.
'Go get the car,' he said. 'Get it started and wait for me in the alley.'
He ran up the stairs two at a time and kicked in the outer office door without breaking stride. Jinked through the secretarial pen like a running back and steadied himself and kicked in Walker's door. It smashed back and the venetian blind jerked sideways and the glass pane behind it shattered and the shards rained down like ice in winter. He went straight for the bank of filing cabinets. The lights were off and the office was hot and dark and he had to peer close to read the labels. It was an odd filing system. It was arranged partly in date order and partly by the alphabet. That was going to be a minor problem. He found a cabinet marked _B_ and jammed the tip of the screwdriver into the keyhole and hammered it in with the heel of his hand. Turned it sharp and hard and broke the lock. Pulled the drawer and raked through the files with his fingers.
The files all had tiny labels encased in plastic tabs arranged so they made a neat diagonal from left to right. The labels were all typed with words starting with B. But the contents of the files were way too recent. Nothing more than four years old. He stepped two paces sideways and skipped the next _B_ drawer and went to the next but one. The air was hot and still and the bell was ringing loud and the glare of the flashing blue strobe pulsed in through the windows. It was just about keeping time with his heartbeat.
He broke the lock and slid the drawer. Checked the labels. No good. Everything was either six or seven years old. He had been inside the building two minutes and thirty seconds. He could hear a distant siren under the noise of the bell. He stepped sideways again and attacked the next _B_ drawer. He checked the dates on the tabs and walked his fingers backward. Two minutes and fifty seconds. The bell seemed louder and the strobe seemed brighter. The siren was closer. He found what he was looking for three-quarters of the way back through the drawer. It was a two-inch-thick collection of paperwork in a heavy paper sling. He lifted the whole thing out and tucked it under his arm. Left the drawer all the way open and kicked all the others shut. Ran through the secretarial pen and down the stairs. Checked the street from the lobby and when he was certain it was clear he ducked round into the alley and straight into the VW.
'Go,' he said.
He was a little breathless, and that surprised him.
'Where?' Alice asked.
'South,' he said. 'To the Red House.'
'Why? What's there?'
'Everything,' he said.
She took off fast and fifty yards later Reacher saw red lights pulsing in the distance behind them. The Pecos Police Department, arriving at the courthouse just a minute too late. He smiled in the dark and turned his head in time to catch a split-second glimpse of a big sedan nosing left two hundred yards ahead of them into the road that led down to Alice's place. It flashed through the yellow wash of a streetlight and disappeared. It looked like a police-spec Crown Victoria, plain steel wheels and four VHF antennas on the back. He stared into the darkness that had swallowed it and turned his head as they passed.
'Fast as you can,' he said to Alice.
Then he laid the captured paperwork on his knees and reached up and clicked on the dome light so he could read it.
The B was for Border Patrol, and the file summarized the crimes committed by it twelve years ago and the measures taken in response. It made for unpleasant reading.
The border between Mexico and Texas was very long, and for an accumulated total of about half its length there were roads and towns near enough on the American side to make it worth guarding pretty closely. Theory was if illegals penetrated there, they could slip away into the interior fast and easily. Other sectors had nothing to offer except fifty or a hundred miles of empty parched desert. Those sectors weren't really guarded at all. Standard practice was to ignore the border itself and conduct random vehicle sweeps behind the line by day or night to pick the migrants up at some point during their hopeless three-or four-day trudge north across the wastelands. It was a practice that worked well. After the first thirty or so miles on foot through the heat the migrants became pretty passive. Often they surrendered willingly. Often the vehicle sweeps turned into first-aid mercy missions, because the walkers were sick and dehydrated and exhausted because they had no food or water.
They had no food or water because they had been cheated. Usually they would pay their life savings to some operator on the Mexican side who was offering them a fully accompanied one-way trip to paradise. Vans and minibuses would take them from their villages to the border, and then the guide would crouch and point across a deserted footbridge to a distant sandhill and swear that more vans and minibuses were waiting behind it, full of supplies and ready to go. The migrants would take a deep breath and sprint across, only to find nothing behind the distant sandhill. Too hopeful and too afraid to turn back, they would just blindly walk ahead into exhaustion.
Sometimes there _would_ be a vehicle waiting, but its driver would demand a separate substantial payment. The migrants had nothing left to offer, except maybe some small items of personal value. The new driver would laugh and call them worthless. Then he would take them anyway and offer to see what cash he could raise on them up ahead. He would drive off in a cloud of hot dust and never be seen again. The migrants would eventually realize they had been duped, and they would start stumbling north on foot. Then it became a simple question of endurance. The weather was key. In a hot summer, the mortality rate was very high. That was why the Border Patrol's random sweeps were often seen as mercy missions.
Then that suddenly changed.
For a whole year, the roving vehicles were as likely to bring sudden death as arrest or aid. At unpredictable intervals, always at night, rifles would fire and a truck would roar in and swoop and manoeuvre until one lone runner was winnowed out from the pack. Then the lone runner would be hunted for a mile or so and shot down. Then the truck would disappear into the dark again, engine roaring, headlights bouncing, dust trailing, and stunned silence would descend.
Sometimes it wasn't so clean.
Some victims were wounded and dragged away and tortured. The corpse of one teenage boy was found tied to a cactus stump with barbed wire. He had been partially flayed. Some were burned alive or beheaded or mutilated. Three teenage girls were captured over a period of four months. Their autopsy details were gruesome.
None of the survivor families made official complaints. They all shared the illegal's basic fear of involvement with bureaucracy. But stories began to circulate around the community of legal relatives and their support groups. Lawyers and rights advocates started compiling files. Eventually the subject was broached at the appropriate level. A low-level inquiry was started. Evidence was gathered, anonymously. A provable total of seventeen homicides was established. Added to that was an extrapolated figure of eight more, to represent cases where bodies had never been found or where they had been buried by the survivors themselves. Young Raoul García's name was included in the second total.
There was a map in the file. Most of the ambushes had taken place inside a pear-shaped pocket of territory enclosing maybe a hundred square miles. It was marked on the map like a stain. It was centred on a long north–south axis with the southerly bulge sitting mostly inside the Echo County line. That meant the victims had already made it fifty miles or more. By then they would be weak and tired and in no shape to resist.
Border Patrol brass launched a full-scale investigation one August, eleven months after the first vague rumours surfaced. There was one more attack at the end of that month, and then nothing ever again. Denied an ongoing forensic basis for examination, the investigation got nowhere at all. There were preventive measures enforced, like strict accounting of ammunition and increased frequency of radio checks. But no conclusions were reached. It was a thorough job, and to their credit the brass kept hard at it, but a retrospective investigation into a closed paramilitary world where the only witnesses denied ever having been near the border in the first place was hopeless. The matter wound down. Time passed. The homicides had stopped, the survivors were building new lives, the immigration amnesties had insulated the outrage. The tempo of investigation slowed to a halt. The files were sealed four years later.
'So?' Alice said.
Reacher butted the papers together with the heel of his hand. Closed the file. Pitched it behind him into the rear seat.
'Now I know why she lied about the ring,' he said.
'Why?'
'She didn't lie. She was telling the truth.'
'She said it was a fake worth thirty bucks.'
'And she thought that was the truth. Because some jeweller in Pecos laughed at her and _told_ her it was a fake worth thirty bucks. And she believed him. But he was trying to rip her off, was all, trying to buy it for thirty bucks and sell it again for sixty thousand. Oldest scam in the world. Exact same thing happened to some of these immigrants in the file. Their first experience of America.'
'The _jeweller_ lied?'
He nodded. 'I should have figured it before, because it's obvious. Probably the exact same guy we went to. I figured he didn't look like the Better Business Bureau's poster boy.'
'He didn't try to rip _us_ off.'
'No, Alice, he didn't. Because you're a sharp-looking white lawyer and I'm a big tough-looking white guy. She was a small Mexican woman, all alone and desperate and scared. He saw an opportunity with her that he didn't see with us.'
Alice was quiet for a second. 'So what does it mean?' she asked.
Reacher clicked off the dome light. Smiled in the dark and stretched. Put his palms on the dash in front of him and flexed his massive shoulders against the pressure.
'It means we're good to go,' he said. 'It means all our ducks are in a neat little row. And it means you should drive faster, because right now we're maybe twenty minutes ahead of the bad guys, and I want to keep it that way as long as I can.'
She blew straight through the sleeping crossroads hamlet once again and made the remaining sixty miles in forty-three minutes, which Reacher figured was pretty good for a yellow four-cylinder import with a bud vase next to the steering wheel. She made the turn in under the gate and braked hard and stopped at the foot of the porch steps. The porch lights were on and the VW's dust fogged up around them in a khaki cloud. It was close to two o'clock in the morning.
'Leave it running,' Reacher said.
He led her up to the door. Hammered hard on it and got no reply. Tried the handle. It was unlocked. _Why would it be locked? We're sixty miles from the nearest crossroads_. He swung it open and they stepped straight into the red-painted foyer.
'Hold your arms out,' he said.
He unloaded all six .22 hunting rifles out of the rack on the wall and laid them in her arms, alternately muzzle to stock so they would balance. She staggered slightly under the weight.
'Go put them in the car,' he said.
There was the sound of footsteps overhead, then creaking from the stairs, and Bobby Greer came out of the parlour door, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. He was barefoot and wearing boxers and a T-shirt and staring at the empty gun rack.
'Hell you think you're doing?' he said.
'I want the others,' Reacher said. 'I'm commandeering your weapons. On behalf of the Echo County sheriff. I'm a deputy, remember?'
'There aren't any others.'
'Yes, there are, Bobby. No self-respecting red-neck like you is going to be satisfied with a bunch of .22 popguns. Where's the heavy metal?'
Bobby said nothing.
'Don't mess with me, Bobby,' Reacher said. 'It's way too late for that.'
Bobby paused. Then he shrugged. 'OK,' he said.
He padded barefoot across the foyer and pushed open a door that led into a small dark space that could have been a study. He flicked on a light and Reacher saw black and white pictures of oil wells on the walls. There was a desk and a chair and another gun rack filled with four 30-30 Winchesters. Seven-shot lever-action repeaters, big handsome weapons, oiled wood, twenty-inch barrels, beautifully kept. _Wyatt Earp, eat your heart out_.
'Ammunition?' Reacher asked.
Bobby opened a drawer in the gun rack's pedestal. Took out a cardboard box of Winchester cartridges.
'I've got some special loads too,' he said. Took out another box.
'What are they?'
'I made them myself. More power.'
Reacher nodded. 'Take them all out to the car, OK?'
He took the four rifles out of the rack and followed Bobby out of the house. Alice was sitting in the car. The six .22s were piled on the seat behind her. Bobby leaned in and placed the ammunition next to them. Reacher stacked the Winchesters upright behind the passenger seat. Then he turned back to Bobby.
'I'm going to borrow your Jeep,' he said.
Bobby shrugged, barefoot on the hot dirt. 'Keys are in it,' he said.
'You and your mother stay in the house now,' Reacher said. 'Anybody seen out and about will be considered hostile, OK?'
Bobby nodded. Turned and walked to the foot of the steps. Glanced back once and went inside the house. Reacher leaned into the VW to talk to Alice.
'What are we doing?' she said.
'Getting ready.'
'For what?'
'For whatever comes our way.'
'Why do we need ten rifles?'
'We don't. We need one. I don't want to give the bad guys the other nine, is all.'
'They're coming here?'
'They're about ten minutes behind us.'
'So what do we do?'
'We're all going out in the desert.'
'Is there going to be shooting?'
'Probably.'
'Is that smart? You said yourself, they're good shots.'
'With handguns. Best way to defend against handguns is hide a long way off and shoot back with the biggest rifle you can find.'
She shook her head. 'I can't be a part of this, Reacher. It's not right. And I've never even held a rifle.'
'You don't have to shoot,' he said. 'But you have to be a witness. You have to identify exactly who comes for us. I'm relying on you. It's vital.'
'How will I see? It's dark out there.'
'We'll fix that.'
'It's going to rain.'
'That'll help us.'
'This is not right,' she said again. 'The police should handle this. Or the FBI. You can't just shoot at people.'
The air was heavy with storm. The breeze was blowing again and he could smell pressure and voltage building in the sky.
'Rules of engagement, Alice,' he said. 'I'll wait for an overtly hostile act before I do anything. Just like the US Army. OK?'
'We'll be killed.'
'You'll be hiding far away.'
'Then _you'll_ be killed. You said it yourself, they're good at this.'
'They're good at walking up to somebody and shooting them in the head. What they're like out in the open in the dark against incoming rifle fire is anybody's guess.'
'You're crazy.'
'Seven minutes,' he said.
She glanced backward at the road from the north. Then she shook her head and shoved the gearstick into first and held her foot on the clutch. He leaned in and squeezed her shoulder.
'Follow me close, OK?' he said.
He ran down to the motor barn and got into the Greer family's Cherokee. Racked the seat back and started the engine and switched on the headlights. Reversed into the yard and straightened up and looped around the motor barn and headed straight down the dirt track into open country. Checked the mirror and saw the VW right there behind him. Looked ahead again and saw the first raindrop hit his windshield. It was as big as a silver dollar.
SIXTEEN
They drove in convoy for five fast miles through the dark. There was no moonlight. No starlight. Cloud cover was low and thick but it held the rain to nothing more than occasional splattering drops, ten whole seconds between each of them, maybe six in every minute. They exploded against the windshield into wet patches the size of saucers. Reacher swatted each of them separately with the windshield wipers. He held steady around forty miles an hour and followed the track through the brush. It turned randomly left and right, heading basically south toward the storm. The ground was very rough. The Jeep was bouncing and jarring. The VW was struggling to keep pace behind him. Its headlights were swinging and jumping in his mirrors.
Five miles from the house the rain was still holding and the mesquite and the fractured limestone began to narrow the track. The terrain was changing under their wheels. They had started out across a broad desert plain that might have been cultivated grassland a century ago. Now the ground was rising slowly and shading into mesa. Rocky outcrops rose left and right in the headlight beams, channelling them roughly south and east. Taller stands of mesquite crowded in and funnelled them tighter. Soon there was nothing more than a pair of deep ruts worn through the hardpan. Ledges and sinkholes and dense patches of thorny low brush meant they had no choice but to follow them. They curved and twisted and felt like a river bed.
Then the track bumped upward and straightened and ran like a highway across a miniature limestone mesa. The stone was a raised pan as big as a football field, maybe a hundred twenty yards long and eighty wide, roughly oval in shape. There was no vegetation growing on it. Reacher swung the Jeep in a wide circle and used the headlights on bright to check the perimeter. All around the edges the ground fell away a couple of feet into rocky soil. Stunted bushes crowded anyplace they could find to put their roots. He drove a second circle, wider, and he liked what he saw. The miniature mesa was as bare as a dinner plate laid on a dead lawn. He smiled to himself. Timed out in his head what they needed to do. Liked the answer he came up with.
He drove all the way to the far end of the rock table and stopped where the track bumped down off it and disappeared onward. Alice pulled the VW alongside him. He jumped out of the Jeep and ducked down to her window. The night air was still hot. Still damp. The urgent breeze was back. Big raindrops fell lazily and vertically. He felt like he could have dodged each one of them individually. Alice used a switch and buzzed the window down.
'You OK?' he asked her.
'So far,' she said.
'Turn it round and back it up to the edge,' he said. 'All the way back. Block the mouth of the track.'
She manoeuvred the car like she was parking on a city street and ran it backward until it was centred in the mouth of the track and the rear wheels were tight against the drop. She left the front facing exactly north, the way they had come. He nosed the Jeep next to her and opened the tailgate.
'Kill the motor and the lights,' he called. 'Get the rifles.'
She passed him the big Winchesters, one at a time. He laid them sideways in the Jeep's load space. She passed him the .22s, and he pitched them away into the brush, as far as he could throw them. She passed him the two boxes of 30-30 ammunition. Winchester's own, and Bobby Greer's hand-loads. He laid them alongside the rifles. Ducked around to the driver's door and switched the engine off. The lumpy six-cylinder idle died. Silence fell. He listened hard and scanned the northern horizon. The mesquite sighed faintly in the wind. Unseen insects buzzed and chattered. Infrequent raindrops hit his shoulders. That was all. Nothing else. Absolute blackness and silence everywhere.
He came back to the tailgate and opened the ammunition boxes. They were both packed tight with cartridges standing on their firing pins, points upward. The factory shells were new and bright. Bobby's were a little scuffed. Recycled brass. He took one out and held it up to the Jeep's interior light and looked hard at it. _I made them myself_ , Bobby had said. _More power_. Which was logical. Why else would a jerk like Bobby hand-load his own cartridges? Not for _less_ power, that was for sure. Like, why do people tune hot-rod motors? Not to make them milder than stock. It's a boy thing. So Bobby had probably packed and tamped a whole lot of extra powder into each one, maybe thirty or forty extra grains. And maybe he had used hotter powder than normal. Which would give him a couple hundred extra foot-pounds of muzzle energy, and maybe a hundred miles an hour extra velocity. And which would give him the muzzle flash from hell, and which would ruin his breech castings and warp his barrels inside a couple of weeks. But Reacher smiled and took ten more of the shells out of the box anyway. They weren't his guns, and he had just decided muzzle flash was exactly what he was looking for.
He loaded the first Winchester with a single sample of Bobby's hand-loads. The second, he filled with seven more of them. The third, he loaded alternately one stock round, one of Bobby's, another stock round, until it was full with four stock and three hand-loads. The fourth rifle he filled entirely with factory ammo. He laid the guns left to right in sequence across the Jeep's load space and closed the tailgate on them.
'I thought we only needed one,' Alice said.
'I changed the plan,' he said.
He stepped around to the driver's seat and Alice climbed in beside him.
'Where are we going now?' she asked.
He started the engine and backed away from the parked VW.
'Think of this mesa like a clock face,' he said. 'We came in at the six o'clock position. Right now your car is parked at the twelve, facing backward. You're going to be hiding on the rim at the eight. On foot. Your job is to fire a rifle, one shot, and then scoot down to the seven.'
'You said I wouldn't have to shoot.'
'I changed the plan,' he said again.
'But I told you, I can't fire a rifle.'
'Yes, you can. You just pull the trigger. It's easy. Don't worry about aiming or anything. All I want is the sound and the flash.'
'Then what?'
'Then you scoot down to the seven and watch. I'm going to be busy shooting. I need you to ID exactly who I'm shooting at.'
'This isn't right.'
'It isn't wrong, either.'
'You think?'
'You ever seen Clay Allison's grave?'
She rolled her eyes. 'You need to read the history books, Reacher. Clay Allison was a total psychopath. He once killed a guy bunking with him, just because he snored. He was an amoral maniac, plain and simple. Nothing too noble about that.'
Reacher shrugged. 'Well, we can't back out now.'
'Two wrongs don't make a right, you know?'
'It's a choice, Alice. Either we ambush them, or get ambushed _by_ them.'
She shook her head. 'Great,' she said.
He said nothing.
'It's dark,' she said. 'How will I see anything?'
'I'll take care of that.'
'How will I know when to fire?'
'You'll know.'
He pulled the Jeep close to the edge of the limestone table and stopped. Opened the tailgate and took out the first rifle. Checked his bearings and ran to the fractured rock lip and laid the gun on the ground with the butt hanging over the edge and the barrel pointing at the emptiness twenty feet in front of the distant VW. He leaned down and racked the lever. It moved precisely with a sweet metallic _slick-slick_. A fine weapon.
'It's ready to fire,' he said. 'And this is the eight o'clock spot. Stay down below the lip, fire the gun, and then move to the seven. Crouch low all the way. And then watch, real careful. They might fire in your direction, but I guarantee they'll miss, OK?'
She said nothing.
'I promise,' he said. 'Don't worry about it.'
'Are you sure?'
'Superman couldn't hit anything with a handgun in the dark at this distance.'
'They might get lucky.'
'No, Alice, tonight they're not going to get lucky. Believe me.'
'But when do I fire?'
'Fire when ready,' he said.
He watched her hide below the lip of the rock, an arm's length from her rifle.
'Good luck,' he said. 'I'll see you later.'
'Great,' she said again.
He climbed back into the Jeep and hustled it straight across the mesa to the four o'clock position. Spun the wheel and reversed the car and backed it straight off the rock. It bumped down two feet and came to a shuddering stop in the undergrowth. He killed the engine and the lights. Took the fourth rifle and propped it upright against the passenger door. Carried the second and third with him and climbed back onto the ledge and ran in the open to what he estimated was the two o'clock spot. Laid the third rifle carefully on the lip of the rock and ran the rest of the way to the parked VW. Ducked inside and unscrewed the dome light. Eased the driver's door back to three inches from closed and left it. Measured twenty feet clockwise and laid the second rifle on the ground, on the rim of the ledge, somewhere between the twelve and the one. Twelve-thirty, maybe. _No, about twelve-seventeen, to be pedantic_ , he thought. Then he crawled back and lay face-down on the ground, tight up against the VW, with his right shoulder tucked under the little running board and the right side of his face pressed against the sidewall of the front tyre. He was breathing deeply. The tyre smelled like rubber. His left shoulder was out in the weather. Big ponderous raindrops hit it at infrequent intervals. He hitched in closer and settled down to wait. _Eight minutes, perhaps_ , he thought. _Maybe nine_.
It was eleven minutes. They were a little slower than he expected. He saw a flash in the north and at first thought it was lightning, but then it happened again and he saw it was headlight beams bouncing across rough terrain and catching the low grey cloud overhead. A vehicle was pitching and rolling its way through the darkness. It was heading his way, which he knew it would, because the landscape gave it no other choice but to stay on the track. Its lights flared and died as the nose rose and fell. He was sweating. The air around him was hotter than ever. He could feel pressure and electricity in the sky above. The raindrops were falling harder and a little faster. It felt like a fuse was burning and the storm was set to explode. _Not yet_ , he thought. _Please, give me five minutes more_.
Thirty seconds later he could hear an engine. A gasoline engine, running hard. Eight cylinders. The sound rose and fell as the driven wheels gripped the dirt and then bounced and lost traction. _Hard suspension_ , he thought. _Load-carrying suspension_. _Bobby's pick-up, probably_. _The one he used to hunt the armadillo._
He tucked himself tighter against the underside of the VW. The engine noise grew louder. It rose and fell. The lights bounced and swerved. They lit the northern horizon with a dull glow. Then they were near enough to make out as separate twin beams spearing through the mesquite. They threw harsh shadows and flicked left and right as the vehicle turned. Then the truck burst into sight. It bounced up onto the mesa travelling fast. The engine screamed like all four wheels were off the ground. The headlights flared high and then dipped low as it crashed back to earth. It landed slightly off course and the lights swept the perimeter for a second before they straightened ahead. It accelerated on the flatter terrain. The engine was loud. It came on and on, straight at him. Faster and faster. Forty miles an hour, fifty. Seventy yards away. Fifty. Forty. It came straight at him until the bouncing headlights washed over the stationary VW directly ahead of it. The yellow paint above Reacher's shoulder glowed impossibly bright. Then the truck jammed to a panic stop. All four wheels locked hard on the limestone grit and there was a howl of rubber and the truck slewed slightly left and came to rest facing eleven o'clock, maybe thirty yards in front of him. The far edge of the headlight beams washed over him. He forced himself tighter under the VW.
He could smell the raindrops in the dust.
Nothing happened for a second.
Then the pick-up driver killed his lights. They faded to weak orange filaments and died to nothing and total darkness came back. The insects went silent. No sound at all beyond the truck engine idling against the brake. Reacher thought: _Did they see me?_
Nothing happened.
_Now, Alice_ , Reacher thought.
Nothing happened.
_Shoot, Alice_ , he thought. _Shoot now, for God's sake_.
Nothing happened.
Shoot the damn gun, Alice. Just pull the damn trigger.
Nothing happened.
He closed his eyes and paused another whole endless second and braced himself to launch outward anyway. Opened his eyes and took a breath and started moving.
Then Alice fired.
There was a monstrous muzzle flash easily ten feet long far away to his right and the buzzing whine of a supersonic bullet high in the air and a split second later an enormous barking crash clapped across the landscape. He rolled out from under the VW and reached in through the driver's door and flicked the headlights on. Jumped backward into the mesquite and kept rolling and came up into a low crouch six feet away to see the pick-up caught perfectly in the cone of bright light. Three people in it. A driver in the cab. Two figures crouching in the load bed, holding the roll bar one-handed. All three of them with their heads turned abruptly on their shoulders, rigid and frozen and staring backward at the spot Alice had fired from.
They were immobile a split second longer, and then they reacted. The driver flicked his own lights back on. The pick-up and the VW glared at each other like it was a contest. Reacher was dazzled by the light but he saw the figures in the load bed were wearing caps and blue jackets. One figure was smaller than the other. _A woman_ , he thought. He fixed her position carefully in his mind. _Shoot the women first_. That was the standard counter-terrorist doctrine. The experts figured they were more fanatical. And suddenly he knew she was the shooter. She had to be. Small hands, neat fingers. Carmen's Lorcin could have been built for her. She was crouched low alongside her partner on his left.
They both had handguns. They both stared sideways a half-second longer and then snapped forward into the glare and leaned on the pick-up's roof and started shooting at the VW's lights. _Their caps said FBI on the front_. He froze. _What the hell?_ Then he relaxed. _Beautiful_. Fake apparel, fake ID, a tricked-up Crown Vic. _They just went to Alice's place in it. And that's how they stopped Al Eugene on Friday_. They were shooting continuously. He heard the flat dull thumps of powerful nine-millimetre pistols firing fast. He heard spent shells clattering out onto the pick-up's roof. He saw the VW's windshield explode and heard bullets punching through sheet metal and the tinkling of glass and then the VW's lights were gone and he could see nothing at all behind the dazzle of the pick-up's own lights. He sensed the pistols turning back to where they had Alice's firing position fixed in their memories. He saw tiny oblique muzzle flashes and heard bullets whining away from him. The left-hand gun stopped. _The woman. Reloading already_. _Only thirteen shots_ , his subconscious mind told him. _Has to be a SIG Sauer P228 or a Browning Hi-Power_.
He crawled forward to the rim of the mesa and tracked fifteen feet left and found the rifle he had placed at twelve-seventeen. Winchester number two, full of Bobby Greer's hand-loads. He fired without aiming and the recoil almost knocked him off his knees. A tremendous flame leapt out of the muzzle. It was like the strobe on a camera. He had no idea where the bullet went. He racked the lever _slick-slick_ and hustled right, toward the wrecked VW. Fired again. Two huge visible flashes, moving progressively counterclockwise. From the pick-up's vantage point it would look like a person traversing right to left. A smart shooter would fire ahead of the last flash and hope to hit the moving target. _Deflection shooting_. They went for it. He heard bullets whining off the rock near the car. Heard one hit it.
But by then he was on the move in the opposite direction, clockwise again. He dropped the rifle and bent low and ran for the next one. It was there at two o'clock. The third Winchester, the one with the sequenced load. The first shot was a factory bullet. Worth some care. He steadied himself on the lip of the ledge and aimed into the blackness eight feet behind the pick-up's headlights and four feet above them. Fired once. _Now they think there are three riflemen out here, one behind them on the left, two ahead on the right_. There was ringing in his ears and he couldn't see where his bullet went but he heard the woman's voice shout a faint command and the pick-up's headlights promptly died. He fired again at the same spot with the next shell, which was a hand-load. The gout of flame spat out and lit up the mesa and he jinked five feet right. Tracked the frozen visual target in his mind and fired the next. The second factory bullet, neat and straight and true. He heard a sharp scream. Danced one pace to his right and fired the next hand-load. The muzzle flash showed him a body falling head first out of the pick-up bed. It was caught entirely motionless in mid-air. _One down_. _But the wrong one_. It was too big. It was the man. _Factory round next_. He concentrated hard and aimed again slightly left of the place the guy had fallen from. Racked the lever. It moved a quarter-inch and jammed solid on the worn cartridge case from the last hand-load.
Then two things happened. First the pick-up moved. It lurched forward and peeled away fast in a tight desperate circle and headed back north, the way it had come. Then a handgun started firing close to the VW. _The woman was out of the truck. She was on foot in the dark_. She was firing fast. A hail of bullets. They were missing him by three or four feet. The truck raced away. Its lights flicked on again. He tracked them in the corner of his eye. They jerked and bounced and swerved and grew smaller. Then they disappeared off the end of the mesa. The truck just thumped down off the edge of the rock table and hurtled back toward the red house. Its noise faded to nothing and its lights dimmed to a distant glow moving on the far black horizon. The handgun stopped firing. _Reloading again_. There was sudden total silence. Total darkness. A second later the insect chant swam back into focus. It sounded softer than usual. Less frantic. He realized the rain had changed. The heavy drops had stopped and in their place was an insistent patter of drizzle. He held his hand palm-up and felt it building. It grew perceptibly harder and harder within seconds like he was standing in a shower stall and an unseen hand was opening the faucet wider and wider.
He wiped water off his forehead to keep it out of his eyes and laid the jammed rifle quietly in the dust. The dust was already wet under his fingers. It was turning to mud. He moved left, tracking back toward the hidden Jeep. It was maybe forty yards away. The rain got harder. It built and built like there was going to be no limit to its power. It hissed and roared on the mesquite bushes all around him. _Good news and bad news_. The good news was it took making noise out of the equation. He wouldn't have backed himself to move as quietly as the woman could. Not through desert vegetation at night. A frame six feet five in height and two hundred fifty pounds in weight was good for a lot of things, but not for silent progress through unseen thorny plants. The noise of the rain would help him more than her. That was the good news. The bad news was visibility was soon going to be worse than zero. They could bump into each other back to back before either of them knew the other was there.
So a lever-action repeater was not going to be the weapon of choice. Too slow for a snap shot. Too cumbersome to manoeuvre. And a Winchester throws the spent shell out of the top, not out of the side. Which means in a heavy rainstorm it can let water in through the ejection port. And this was going to be a heavy rainstorm. He could sense it. It was going to try to compensate for ten years of drought in a single night.
He made it back to the Jeep at the four o'clock position. Found the fourth rifle propped against its door, full of factory shells. It was already soaked. He shook it off and aimed obliquely across the mesa toward the eleven. Pulled the trigger. It fired. It still worked fine. He fired four more spaced shots, at the twelve, the one, the two, the three. Fan fire. _A gamble_. The upside was he might get lucky and hit the woman. Downside was it would tell her he was on his own. One guy, more than one rifle. That was now an easy deduction. And it would tell her where he was. If she was counting it would suggest to her he was waiting there with the last two shells still in the magazine.
So he slid the gun under the Jeep and waded west through the brush until he was forty feet from the edge of the rock. Pulled Alice's Heckler & Koch out of his pocket and knocked the safety off. Knelt down and smeared mud over his hands and arms and face and waited for lightning to strike. Summer storms he had witnessed before in hot parts of the world always featured lightning. Gigantic thunderheads rubbed and jostled overhead and the voltage built to an unbearable level. Five more minutes, he guessed. Then lightning would fire in bolts or sheets and the landscape would flash with brightness. He was in khaki clothes and had smeared khaki mud on his skin. He doubted that she had.
He worked south, away from the Jeep, back toward the wrecked VW, keeping forty feet in the undergrowth. The darkness was total. The rain was building relentlessly. It built to the point where it was absolutely impossible that it could build any harder, and then it just kept on building. The limestone sinkholes were already full of water. Rain was lashing their surfaces. Small rivers were running around his feet, gurgling into bottomless crevasses all around. The noise was astonishing. The rain was roaring against the ground so hard that it was impossible to imagine a louder sound. Then it fell harder and the sound got louder.
He realized the camouflage mud had rinsed straight off his skin. Impossible for it not to. Carmen's shower was like a grudging trickle in comparison. He began to worry about breathing. How could there be air to breathe, with so much water? It was running down his face in solid streams and running straight into his mouth. He put his hand over his jaw and sucked air through his fingers and spat and spluttered the rainwater away.
He was opposite the two o'clock position and thirty feet from the ledge when the lightning started. Far to the south a ragged bolt exploded from the sky and hit the earth five miles away. It was pure intense white and shaped like a bare tree hurled upside down by a hurricane. He fell to a crouch and stared straight ahead, looking for peripheral vision. Saw nothing. The thunder followed the lightning, five seconds later, a ragged tearing rumble. _Where is she? Does she think she's smarter than she thinks I am? In which case she'll be behind me_. But he didn't turn round. Life is always about guessing and gambling, and he had her pegged as a slick operator, for sure. _In her world_. Put her out on the street face to face with Al Eugene, and she's got the smarts to charm the birds out of the trees. _But put her down all alone in open combat territory at night in a storm, and she's struggling. I'm good at this. She's not. She's in front of me, clinging to the edge of the mesa somewhere, scared like she's never been scared before. She's mine_.
The storm was moving. The second lightning strike came three minutes later and a mile north and east of the first one. It was a jagged sheet that flickered insanely for eight or ten seconds before dying into darkness. Reacher craned upward and scanned ahead and right. Saw nothing. Turned and scanned left. Saw the woman seventy feet away, crouched in the lee of the ledge. He could see the white writing on her cap. _FBI_. Big letters. She was looking straight at him and her gun was rigid in her hand and her arm was fully extended from the shoulder. He saw the muzzle flash as she fired at him. It was a tiny dull spark completely overwhelmed by the storm.
The storm drifted slowly north and east and pushed the leading edge of rain ahead of it. It reached the motel building and built steadily and quickly from a whisper to a patter to a hard relentless drumming on the roof. It was a metal roof and within thirty seconds the noise was very loud. It woke Ellie from a restless troubled sleep. She opened her eyes wide and saw the small dark man with hair on his arms. He was sitting very still in a chair near the bed, watching her.
'Hi, kid,' he said.
Ellie said nothing.
'Can't sleep?'
Ellie looked up at the ceiling. 'Raining,' she said. 'It's noisy.'
The man nodded, and checked his watch.
She missed him. Impossible to tell by how much. The lightning died and plunged the world back into absolute darkness. Reacher fired once at the remembered target and listened hard. Nothing. _Probably a miss. Seventy feet in heavy rain, not an easy shot_. Then the thunderclap came. It was a shuddering bass boom that rocked the ground and rolled slowly away. He crouched again. He had nine bullets left. Then he threw the double-bluff dice. _She'll think I'll move, so I won't_. He stayed right where he was. Waited for the next lightning bolt. It would tell him how good she was. An amateur would move away from him. A good pro would move closer. A _really_ good pro would double-bluff the double-bluff and stay exactly where she was.
By then the rain was as heavy as it was going to get. That was his guess. He had once been caught in a jungle storm in Central America and gotten wet faster than falling fully clothed into the sea. That was the hardest rain imaginable and this was easily comparable. He was completely soaked to the skin. _Beyond_ soaked. Water was running in continuous torrents under his shirt. Pouring off him, not dripping. It sluiced out of his buttonholes like jets. He was cold. The temperature had plummeted twenty or thirty degrees in less than twenty minutes. As much water was bouncing upward around him as was lashing down. The noise was unbearable. Leaves and stalks were tearing off the bushes. They were flowing and eddying away and building tiny beaver dams against every rock on the ground. The hard hot grit had washed into slushy mud six inches deep. His feet were sinking in it. His gun was soaked. _That's OK. A Heckler & Koch will fire wet. But so will a Browning or a SIG_.
The next lightning flash was still well to the south, but it was nearer. And brighter. It was a gigantic lateral bolt that hissed and crackled across the sky. He scanned left. The woman had moved closer. She was sixty feet away from him, still tight against the mesa. _Good, but not really good_. She fired at him and missed by four feet. It was a hasty shot and her arm was still swinging in from the south. _The south? She figured I'd moved away_. He felt mildly insulted and levelled his arm and fired back. The incoming thunderclap buried the sound of the shot. _Probably a miss. Eight left_.
Then it was back to the calculations. _What will she do? What will she figure I'll do?_ She had been wrong the last time. _So this time she'll gamble. She'll guess I'll move in closer. So she'll move in closer, too. She'll go for the killing shot immediately_.
He stayed in a crouch, exactly where he was. _Triple-bluff_. He tracked his gun hand left to right along the theoretical direction she must be moving. Waited for the precious lightning. It came sooner than he expected. The storm was ripping in fast. It exploded not more than a half-mile away and was followed almost immediately by a bellow of thunder. The flash was brighter than the sun. He squinted ahead. _The woman was gone_. He jerked left and saw a smudge of vivid blue backtracking away in the opposite direction. He fired instinctively just ahead of it and the lightning died and darkness and noise and chaos collapsed around him. _Seven left_. He smiled. _But now I only need one more_.
The sound of thunder frightened her. It sounded like when Joshua and Billy had put a new roof on the motor barn. They had used big sheets of tin and they boomed and flexed when they were carrying them and made a horrible noise when they hammered the nails through. Thunder was like a hundred million billion sheets of roofing tin all flexing and booming in the sky. She ducked her head under the sheets and watched the room light up with bright wobbling flashes of lightning outside the window.
'Are you scared?' the man asked.
She nodded, under the sheets. It scrubbed her hair, but she was sure the man could see her head moving.
'Don't be scared,' the man said. 'It's only a storm. Big girls aren't scared of storms.'
She said nothing. He checked his watch again.
Her tactics were transparent. She was good, but not good enough to be unreadable. She was working close in to the rim of the mesa, because it offered an illusion of safety. She was working an _in-out-in-in_ move. Double-bluffing, triple-bluffing, aiming to be unpredictable. _Smart, but not smart enough_. She had moved close, and then moved away. Now she would move close again, and then the next time not away again, but closer still. She figured he would begin to read the pattern and anticipate the yo-yo outward. But she would come inward instead. To wrong-foot him. And because she wanted to be close. She _liked_ close. A head-shot artiste like her, he guessed her preferred range would be something less than ten feet.
He jumped out of his crouch and ran as hard as he could, like a sprinter, backward and left, curving around in a fast wide circle. He crashed through the brush like a panicked animal, big leaping strides, hurdling mesquite, splashing through puddles, sliding through the mud. He didn't care how much noise he was making. He would be inaudible a yard away. All that mattered was how fast he was. He needed to outflank her before the next lightning bolt.
He ran wildly in a big looping curve and then slowed and skidded and eased in close to the limestone ledge maybe twenty feet north of where he had first seen her. She had moved south, and then back, so now she would be on her way south again. She ought to be thirty feet ahead by now. Right in front of him. He walked after her, fast and easy, like he was on a sidewalk somewhere. Kept loose, trying to second-guess the rhythm of the lightning, staying ready to hit the wet dirt.
The small dark man checked his watch again. Ellie hid under the sheet.
'Over three hours,' the man said.
Ellie said nothing.
'Can you tell the time?'
Ellie straightened up in the bed and pulled the sheet down slowly, all the way past her mouth.
'I'm six and a half,' she said.
The man nodded. 'Look,' he said.
He held out his arm and twisted his wrist.
'One more hour,' he said.
'Then what?'
The man looked away. Ellie watched him a long moment more. Then she pulled the sheet back over her head. The thunder boomed and the lightning flashed.
The flash lit up the whole landscape for miles ahead. The crash of thunder crowded in on top of it. Reacher dropped to a crouch and stared. _She wasn't there_. She was nowhere in front of him. The lightning died and the thunder rolled on. For a second he wondered whether he would hear her gun over it. _Would he?_ Or would the first he knew be the sickening impact of the bullet? He dropped full length into the mud and lay still. Felt the rain lashing his body like a thousand tiny hammers. _OK, rethink_. Had _she_ outflanked _him_? She could have attempted an exact mirror-image of his own move. In which case they had each sprinted a wide fast circle in opposite directions and essentially exchanged positions. Or she could have found a sinkhole or a crevasse and gone to ground. She could have found the Jeep. If she'd glanced backward during a lightning strike she would have seen it. It was an easy conclusion that he'd have to get back to it eventually. How else was he going to get out of the desert? So maybe she was waiting there. Maybe she was inside it, crouching low. Maybe she was _under_ it, in which case he had just presented her with a Winchester rifle with two factory rounds still in the magazine.
He stayed down in the mud, thinking hard. He ignored the next lightning flash altogether. Just pressed himself into the landscape, calculating, deciding. He rejected the possibility of the flanking manoeuvre. That was military instinct. He was dealing with a street shooter, not an infantry soldier. No infantryman would aim for a guy's eye. Percentages were against it. So maybe she had gone for the Jeep. He swam himself through a stationary muddy circle and raised his head and waited.
The next flash was a sheet, rippling madly and lighting the underside of the clouds like a battlefield flare. The Jeep was a long way away. Too far, surely. And if she _had_ gone for it, she was no immediate threat. Not all the way back there, not at that distance. So he swivelled back around and crawled on south. _Check and clear, zone by zone_. He moved slowly, on his knees and elbows. Ten feet, twenty, twenty-five. It felt exactly like basic training. He crawled on and on, and then he smelled perfume.
It was somehow intensified by the rain. He realized the whole desert smelled different. The rain had changed things entirely. He could smell plants and earth. They made a strong, pungent, natural odour. But mixed into it was a woman's perfume. _Was_ it perfume? Or was it something from nature, like a night flower suddenly blooming in the storm? No, it was perfume. A woman's perfume. No question about it. He stopped moving and lay completely still.
He could hear the mesquite moving, but it was only the wind. The rain was easing back toward torrential and a strong wet breeze was coming in from the south, teasing him with the smell of perfume. It was absolutely dark. He raised his gun and couldn't see it in his hand. Like he was a blind man.
_Which way is she facing? Not east_. She had to be crouched low, so to the east there would be nothing to see except the blank two-foot wall that was the edge of the mesa. If she was looking south or west, no problem. _If she's looking north, she's looking straight at me, except she can't see me. Too dark. She can't smell me either, because I'm upwind_. He raised himself on his left forearm and pointed his gun straight from his right shoulder. If she was facing south or west, it would give him an easy shot into her back. _But worst case, she's looking north and we're exactly facing each other. We could be five feet apart. So it's a gamble now. When the lightning flashes, who reacts first?_
He held his breath. Waited for the lightning. It was the longest wait of his life. The storm had changed. Thunder was rumbling long and loud, but it wasn't sharp any more. The rain was still heavy. It kicked mud and grit up onto his face. Thrashed against the brush. Brand new streams gurgled all around his prone body. He was half submerged in water. He was very cold.
Then there was a split-second tearing sound in the sky and a gigantic thunderclap crashed and a bolt of lightning fired absolutely simultaneously. It was impossibly white and harsh and the desert lit up brighter than day. The woman was three feet in front of him. She was slumped face down on the ground, already battered by rain and silted with mud. She looked small and collapsed and empty. Her legs were bent at the knees and her arms were folded under her. Her gun had fallen next to her shoulder. _A Browning Hi-Power_. It was half submerged in the mud and a small thicket of twigs had already dammed against one side of it. He used the last of the lightning flash to scrabble for it and hurl it far away. Then the light died and he used the afterimage retained in his eyes to find her neck.
There was no pulse. She was already very cold.
_Deflection shooting_. His third bullet, instinctively placed just ahead of her as she scrambled away from him. She had jumped straight into its path. He kept the fingers of his left hand on the still pulse in her neck, afraid to lose contact with her in the dark. He settled down to wait for the next lightning flash. His left arm started shaking. He told himself it was because he was holding it at an unnatural angle. Then he started laughing. It built quickly, like the rain. He had spent the last twenty minutes stalking a woman he had already shot dead. _Accidentally_. He laughed uncontrollably until the rain filled his mouth and set him coughing and spluttering wildly.
The man stood up and walked over to the credenza. Picked up his gun from where it was lying on the polished wood. Ducked down to the black nylon valise and took out a long black silencer. Fitted it carefully to the muzzle of the gun. Walked back to the chair and sat down again.
'It's time,' he said.
He put his hand on her shoulder. She felt it through the sheet. She wriggled away from him. Swam down in the bed and curled up. She needed to pee. Very badly.
'It's time,' the man said again.
He folded the sheet back. She scrabbled away, holding the opposite hem tight between her knees. Looked straight at him.
'You said one more hour,' she said. 'It hasn't been an hour yet. I'll tell that lady. She's your boss.'
The man's eyes went blank. He turned and looked at the door, just for a moment. Then he turned back.
'OK,' he said. 'You tell me when you think it's been one more hour.'
He let go of the sheet and she wrapped herself up in it again. Ducked her head under it and put her hands over her ears to block the noise of the thunder. Then she closed her eyes, but she could still see the lightning flashes through the sheet and through her eyelids. They looked red.
The next flash was sheet lightning again, vague and diffuse and flickering. He rolled the body over, just to be sure. Tore open her jacket and shirt. He had hit her in the left armpit. It was through-and-through, exiting in the opposite wall of her chest. Probably got her heart, both lungs and her spine. A .40 bullet was not a subtle thing. It took a lot to stop one. The entry wound was small and neat. The exit wound wasn't. The rain flushed it clean. Diluted blood leaked all over the place and instantly disappeared. Her chest cavity was filling with water. It looked like a medical diagram. He could have sunk his whole hand in there.
She was medium-sized. Blond hair, soaked and full of mud where it spilled out under the FBI cap. He pushed the bill of the cap upward so he could see her face. Her eyes were open and staring at the sky and filling with rain like tears. Her face was slightly familiar. He had seen her before. _Where?_ The lightning died and he was left with the image of her face in his mind, harsh and white and reversed like a photograph's negative. _The diner. The Coke floats. Friday, school quitting time, a Crown Victoria, three passengers_. He had pegged them as a sales team. _Wrong again_.
'OK,' he said out loud. 'Ballgame over.'
He put Alice's gun back in his pocket and walked away north, back to the Jeep. It was so dark and he had so much rain in his eyes he thumped right into the side of it before he knew he was there. He tracked around it with a hand on the hood and found the driver's door. Opened it and closed it and opened it again, just for the thrill of making the dome light come on inside, illumination he could control for himself.
It wasn't easy driving back up onto the limestone. The grit that should have been under the wheels and aiding traction was now slick mud. He put the headlights on bright and started the wipers beating fast and selected four wheel drive and slid around for a while before the front tyres caught and dragged the car up the slope. Then he hooked a wide curve ahead and left all the way across to the seven o'clock position. He hit the horn twice and Alice walked out of the mesquite into the headlight beams. She was soaked to the skin. Water was pouring off her. Her hair was plastered flat. Her ears stuck out a little. She stepped to her left and ran around to the passenger door.
'I guess this is the storm people were expecting,' he said.
Lightning flared again outside. A ragged bolt far to their left, accompanied by an explosion of thunder. The weather was moving north, and fast.
She shook her head. 'This little shower? This is just a taste. Wait until tomorrow.'
'I'll be gone tomorrow.'
'You will?'
He nodded. 'You OK?' he asked.
'I didn't know when to fire.'
'You did fine.'
'What happened?'
He drove off again, turning south, zigzagging the Jeep to fan the headlight beams back and forth across the mesa. Thirty feet in front of the wrecked VW, he found the first guy's body. It was humped and inert. He dipped the lights so they would shine directly on it and jumped out into the rain. The guy was dead. He had taken the Winchester's bullet in the stomach. He hadn't died instantaneously. His hat was missing and he had torn open his jacket to clutch his wound. He had crawled quite a distance. He was tall and heavily built. Reacher closed his eyes and scanned back to the scene in the diner. _By the register. The woman, two men. One big and fair, one small and dark_. Then he walked back to the Jeep and slid inside. The seat was soaked.
'Two dead,' he said. 'That's what happened. But the driver escaped. Did you ID him?'
'They came to kill us, didn't they?'
'That was the plan. Did you ID the driver?'
She said nothing.
'It's very important, Alice,' he said. 'For Ellie's sake. We don't have a tongue. That part didn't work out. They're both dead.'
She said nothing.
'Did you see him?'
She shook her head. 'No, not really,' she said. 'I'm very sorry. I was running, the lights were only on a second or two.'
It had seemed longer than that to Reacher. Much longer. But in reality, she was probably right. She was maybe even over-estimating. It might have been only three-quarters of a second. They had been very quick with the triggers.
'I've seen these people before,' he said. 'On Friday, up at the crossroads. Must have been after they got Eugene. They must have been scouting the area. Three of them. A woman, a big guy, a small dark guy. I can account for the woman and the big guy. So was it the small dark guy driving tonight?'
'I didn't really see.'
'Gut feeling?' Reacher said. 'First impression? You must have gotten a glimpse. Or seen a silhouette.'
'Didn't you?'
He nodded. 'He was facing away from me, looking down to where you fired from. There was a lot of glare. Some rain on his windshield. Then I was shooting, and then he took off. But I don't think he was small.'
She nodded, too. 'Gut feeling, he wasn't small. Or dark. It was just a blur, but I'd say he was big enough. Maybe fair-haired.'
'Makes sense,' Reacher said. 'They left one of the team behind to guard Ellie.'
'So who was driving?'
'Their client. The guy who hired them. That's my guess. Because they were short-handed, and because they needed local knowledge.'
'He got away.'
Reacher smiled. 'He can run, but he can't hide.'
They went to take a look at the wrecked VW. It was beyond help. Alice didn't seem too concerned about it. She just shrugged and turned away. Reacher took the maps from the glovebox and turned the Jeep round and headed north. The drive back to the Red House was a nightmare. Crossing the mesa was OK. But beyond the end of it the desert track was baked so hard that it wasn't absorbing any water at all. The rain was flooding all over the surface. The part that had felt like a river bed _was_ a river bed. It was pouring with a fast torrent that boiled up over the tyres. Mesquite bushes had been torn off their deep taproots and washed out of their shallow toeholds and whole trees were racing south on the swirl. They dammed against the front of the Jeep and rode with it until crosscurrents tore them loose. Sinkholes were concealed by the tide. But the rain was easing fast. It was dying back to drizzle. The eye of the storm had blown away to the north.
They were right next to the motor barn before they saw it. It was in total darkness. Reacher braked hard and swerved around it and saw pale lights flickering behind some of the windows in the house.
'Candles,' he said.
'Power must be out,' Alice said. 'The lightning must have hit the lines.'
He braked again and slid in the mud and turned the car so the headlights washed deep into the barn.
'Recognize anything?' he asked.
Bobby's pick-up was back in its place, but it was wet and streaked with mud. Water was dripping out of the load bed and pooling on the ground.
'OK,' Alice said. 'So what now?'
Reacher stared into the mirror. Then he turned his head and watched the road from the north.
'Somebody's coming,' he said.
There was a faint glow of headlights behind them, rising and falling, many miles distant, breaking into a thousand pieces in the raindrops on the Jeep's windows.
'Let's go say howdy to the Greers,' he said.
He pulled Alice's gun out of his pocket and checked it. _Never assume_. But it was OK. _Cocked and locked. Seven left_. He put it back in his pocket and drove across the soaking yard to the foot of the porch steps. The rain was almost gone. The ground was beginning to steam. The vapour rose gently and swirled in the headlight beams. They got out into the humidity. The temperature was coming back. So was the insect noise. There was a faint whirring chant all around. It sounded wary and very distant.
He led her up the porch steps and pushed open the door. The hallway had candles burning in holders placed here and there on all the available horizontal surfaces. They gave a soft orange glow and made the foyer warm and inviting. He ushered Alice through to the parlour. Stepped in behind her. More candles were burning in there. Dozens of them. They were glued to saucers with melted wax. There was a Coleman lantern standing on a credenza against the end wall. It was hissing softly and burning bright.
Bobby and his mother were sitting together at the red-painted table. Shadows were dancing and flickering all around them. The candlelight was kind to Rusty. It took twenty years off her. She was fully dressed, in jeans and a shirt. Bobby sat beside her, looking at nothing in particular. The tiny flames lit his face and made it mobile.
'Isn't this romantic,' Reacher said.
Rusty moved, awkwardly. 'I'm scared of the dark,' she said. 'Can't help it. Always have been.'
'You should be,' Reacher said. 'Bad things can happen in the dark.'
She made no reply to that.
'Towel?' Reacher asked. He was dripping water all over the floor. So was Alice.
'In the kitchen,' Rusty said.
There was a thin striped towel on a wooden roller. Alice blotted her face and hair and patted her shirt. Reacher did the same, and then he stepped back into the parlour.
'Why are you both up?' he asked. 'It's three o'clock in the morning.'
Neither of them answered.
'Your truck was out tonight,' Reacher said.
'But we weren't,' Bobby said. 'We stayed inside, like you told us to.'
Rusty nodded. 'Both of us, together.'
Reacher smiled. 'Each other's alibi,' he said. 'That would get them rolling in the aisles, down in the jury room.'
'We didn't do anything,' Bobby said.
Reacher heard a car on the road. Just the faint subliminal sound of tyres slowing on soaked blacktop. The faint whistle of drive belts turning under a hood. Then there was a slow wet crunch as it turned under the gate. Grit and pebbles popped under the wheels as it drove up to the porch. There was a tiny squeal from a brake rotor and then silence as the engine died. The _clunk_ of a door closing. Feet on the porch steps. The house door opening, footsteps crossing the foyer. Then the parlour door opened. The candle flames swayed and flickered. Hack Walker stepped into the room.
'Good,' Reacher said. 'We don't have much time.'
'Did you rob my office?' Walker replied.
Reacher nodded. 'I was curious.'
'About what?'
'About details,' Reacher said. 'I'm a details guy.'
'You didn't need to break in. I'd have shown you the files.'
'You weren't there.'
'Whatever, you shouldn't have broken in. You're in trouble for it. You can understand that, right? Big trouble.'
Reacher smiled. _Bad luck and trouble, been my only friends_.
'Sit down, Hack,' he said.
Walker paused a second. Then he threaded his way around all the chairs and sat down next to Rusty Greer. Candlelight lit his face. The lantern glowed to his left.
'You got something for me?' he asked.
Reacher sat opposite. Laid his hands palm-down on the wood.
'I was a cop of sorts for thirteen years,' he said.
'So?'
'I learned a lot of stuff.'
'Like?'
'Like, lies are messy. They get out of control. But the truth is messy, too. So any situation you're in, you expect rough edges. Anytime I see anything that's all buttoned up, I get real suspicious. And Carmen's situation was messy enough to be real.'
'But?'
'I came to see there were a couple of edges that were just _too_ rough.'
'Like what?'
'Like, she had no money with her. I _know_ that. Two million in the bank, and she travels three hundred miles with a single dollar in her purse? Sleeps in the car, doesn't eat? Leapfrogs from one Mobil station to the next, just to keep going? That didn't tie up for me.'
'She was playacting. That's who she is.'
'You know who Nicolaus Copernicus is?'
'Was,' Walker said. 'Some old astronomer. Polish, I think. Proved the earth goes round the sun.'
Reacher nodded. 'And much more than that, by implication. He asked us all to consider how likely is it that we're at the absolute centre of things? What are the odds? That what we're seeing is somehow exceptional? The very best or the very worst? It's an important philosophical point.'
'So?'
'So if Carmen had two million bucks in the bank but travelled with a single dollar just in case she bumped into a guy as suspicious as me, then she is undoubtedly the number-one best-prepared con artist in the history of the world. And old Copernicus asks me, how likely _is_ that? That I should by chance happen to bump into the best con artist in the history of the world? His answer is, not very likely, really. He says the likelihood is, if I bump into a con artist at all, it'll be a very average and mediocre one.'
'So what are you saying?'
'I'm saying it didn't tie up for me. So it got me thinking about the money. And then something else didn't tie up.'
'What?'
'Al Eugene's people messengered Sloop's financial stuff over, right?'
'This morning. Feels like a long time ago.'
'Thing is, I saw Al's office. When I went to the museum. It's literally within sight of the courthouse. It's a one-minute walk. So how likely is it they would _messenger_ something over? Wouldn't they just _walk_ it over? For a friend of Al's? Especially if it was urgent? It would take them ten times as long just to dial the phone for the courier service.'
The candlelight danced and flickered. The red room glowed.
'People messenger things all the time,' Walker said. 'It's routine. And it was too hot for walking.'
Reacher nodded. 'Maybe. It didn't mean much at the time. But then something _else_ didn't tie up. The collar bone.'
'What about it?'
Reacher turned to face Alice. 'When you fell off your inline skates, did you break your collar bone?'
'No,' Alice said.
'Any injuries at all?'
'I tore up my hand. A lot of road rash.'
'You put your hand out to break your fall?'
'Reflex,' she said. 'It's impossible not to.'
Reacher nodded. Turned back through the candlelit gloom to Walker.
'I rode with Carmen on Saturday,' he said. 'My first time ever. My ass got sore, but the thing I really remember is how _high_ I was. It's scary up there. So the thing is, if Carmen fell off, from that height, onto rocky dirt, hard enough to bust her collar bone, how is it that she didn't get road rash, too? On her hand?'
'Maybe she did.'
'The hospital didn't write it up.'
'Maybe they forgot.'
'It was a very detailed report. New staff, working hard. I noticed that, and Cowan Black did, too. He said they were very thorough. They wouldn't have neglected lacerations to the palm.'
'She must have worn riding gloves.'
Reacher shook his head. 'She told me nobody wears gloves down here. Too hot. And she definitely wouldn't have said that if gloves had once saved her from serious road rash. She'd have been a big fan of gloves, in that case. She'd have certainly made _me_ wear them, being new to it.'
'So?'
'So I started to wonder if the collar bone thing _could_ have been from Sloop hitting her. I figured it was possible. Maybe she's on her knees, a big clubbing fist from above, she moves her head. Only she also claimed he had broken her arm and her jaw and knocked her teeth loose, too, and there was no mention of all that stuff, so I stopped wondering. Especially when I found out the ring was real.'
A candle on the left end of the table died. It burned out and smoke rose from it in a thin plume that ran absolutely straight for a second and then spiralled crazily.
'She's a liar,' Walker said. 'That's all.'
'She sure is,' Bobby said.
'Sloop never hit her,' Rusty said. 'A son of mine would never hit a woman, whoever she was.'
'One at a time, OK?' Reacher said, quietly.
Then he paused a beat and there was impatience in the room. Elbows shifting on the table, feet moving on the floor. He turned to Bobby first.
'You claim she's a liar,' he said. 'And I know why. It's because you don't like her, because you're a racist piece of shit, and because she had an affair with the schoolteacher. So among other things you took it on yourself to try and turn me off her. Some kind of loyalty to your brother.'
Then he turned to Rusty. 'We'll get to what Sloop did and didn't do real soon. But right now, you keep quiet, OK? Hack and I have business.'
'What business?' Walker said.
'This business,' Reacher said, and propped Alice's gun on the tabletop, the butt resting on the wood and the muzzle pointing straight at Walker's chest.
'What the hell are you doing?' Walker said.
Reacher clicked the safety off with his thumb. The _snick_ sounded loud in the room. Candles flickered and the lantern hissed softly.
'I figured out the thing with the diamond,' he said. 'Then everything else fell neatly into place. Especially with you giving us the badges and sending us down here to speak with Rusty.'
'What are you talking about?'
'It was like a conjuring trick. The whole thing. You knew Carmen pretty well. So you knew what she must have told me. Which was the absolute truth, always. The truth about herself, and about what Sloop was doing to her. So you just exactly reversed everything. It was simple. A very neat and convincing trick. Like she told me she was from Napa, and you said, _hey, I bet she told you she's from Napa, but she isn't, you know_. Like she told me she'd called the IRS, and you said, _hey, I bet she told you she called the IRS, but she didn't, really_. It was like _you_ knew the real truth and were reluctantly exposing commonplace lies she had told before. But it was _you_ who was lying. All along. It was very, very effective. Like a conjuring trick. And you dressed it all up behind pretending you wanted to save her. You fooled me for a long time.'
'I _did_ want to save her. I _am_ saving her.'
'Bullshit, Hack. Your only aim all along was to coerce a confession out of her for something she didn't do. It was a straightforward plan. Your hired guns kidnapped Ellie today so you could force Carmen to confess. I was your only problem. I stuck around, I recruited Alice. We were in your face from Monday morning onward. So you misled us for twenty-seven straight hours. You let us down slowly and regretfully, point by point. It was beautifully done. Well, almost. To really make it work, you'd have to be the best con artist in the world. And like old Copernicus says, what are the odds that the best con artist in the world would happen to be up there in Pecos?'
There was silence. Just sputtering wax, the hissing of the lantern, five people breathing. The old air conditioner wasn't running. No power.
'You're crazy,' Walker said.
'No, I'm not. You decoyed me by being all regretful about what a liar Carmen was and how desperate you were to save her. You were even smart enough to reveal a cynical reason for _wanting_ to save her. About wanting to be a judge, so I wouldn't think you were too good to be true. That was a great touch, Hack. But all the time you were talking to her on the phone, muffling your voice to get past the desk clerk, telling him you were her lawyer, telling _her_ if she ever spoke to a _real_ lawyer, you'd hurt Ellie. Which is why she refused to speak with Alice. Then you wrote out a bunch of phoney financial statements on your own computer right there at your desk. One print-out looks much the same as any other. And you drafted the phoney trust deeds. And the phoney Family Services papers. You knew what real ones looked like, I guess. Then as soon as you heard your people had picked up the kid you got back on the phone and coached Carmen through the phoney confession, feeding back to _her_ all the lies you'd told to _me_. Then you sent your assistant downstairs to listen to them.'
'This is nonsense.'
Reacher shrugged. 'So let's prove it. Let's call the FBI and ask them how the hunt for Ellie is going.'
'Phones are out,' Bobby said. 'Electrical storm.'
Reacher nodded. 'OK, no problem.'
He kept the gun pointed at Walker's chest and turned to face Rusty.
'Tell me what the FBI agents asked you,' he said.
Rusty looked blank. 'What FBI agents?'
'No FBI agents came here tonight?'
She just shook her head. Reacher nodded.
' _You_ were playacting, Hack,' he said. 'You told us you'd called the FBI and the State Police, and there were roadblocks in place, and helicopters up, and more than a hundred fifty people on the ground. But you didn't call anybody. Because if you had, the very _first_ thing they would have done is come down here. They'd have talked to Rusty for hours. They'd have brought sketch artists and crime scene technicians. This is the scene of the crime, after all. And Rusty is the only witness.'
'You're wrong, Reacher,' Walker said.
'There _were_ FBI people here,' Bobby said. 'I saw them in the yard.'
Reacher shook his head.
'There were people wearing FBI hats,' he said. 'Two of them. But they aren't wearing those hats any more.'
Walker said nothing.
'Big mistake, Hack,' Reacher said. 'Giving us those stupid badges and sending us down here. You're in law enforcement. You knew Rusty was the vital witness. You also knew she wouldn't co-operate fully with me. So it was an inexplicable decision for a DA to take, to send us down here. I couldn't believe it. Then I saw why. You wanted us out of the way. And you wanted to know where we were, at all times. So you could send your people after us.'
'What people?'
'The hired guns, Hack. The people in the FBI hats. The people you sent to kill Al Eugene. The people you sent to kill Sloop. They were pretty good. Very professional. But the thing with professionals is, they need to be able to work again in the future. Al Eugene was no problem. Could have been anybody, out there in the middle of nowhere. But Sloop was harder. He was just home from prison, wasn't going anyplace for a spell. So it had to be done right here, which was risky. They made you agree to cover their asses by framing Carmen. Then you made _them_ agree to help you do it by moonlighting as the kidnap team.'
'This is ridiculous,' Walker said.
'You knew Carmen had bought a gun,' Reacher said. 'You told me, the paperwork comes through your office. And you knew _why_ she bought it. You knew all about Sloop and what he did to her. You knew their bedroom was a torture chamber. So she wants to hide a gun in there, where does she put it? Three choices, really. Top shelf of her closet, in her bedside table, or in her underwear drawer. Common sense. Same for any woman in any bedroom. I know it, and your people knew it. They probably watched through the window until she went to shower, they slipped some gloves on, a minute later they're in the room, they cover Sloop with their own guns until they find Carmen's, and they shoot him with it. They're outside again thirty seconds later. A quick sprint back to where they left their car on the road, and they're gone. This house is a warren. But you know it well. You're a friend of the family. You assured them they could be in and out without being seen. You probably drew them a floor plan.'
Walker closed his eyes. Said nothing. He looked old and pale. The candlelight wasn't helping him.
'But you made mistakes, Hack,' Reacher said. 'People like you always make mistakes. The financial reports were clumsy. Lots of money, but hardly any expenditure? How likely is that? What is she, a miser, too? And the messenger thing was a bad slip. If they _had_ been messengered, you'd have left them in the courier packet, like you did with the medical reports, to make them look even more official.'
Walker opened his eyes, defiant. 'The medical reports,' he repeated. 'You saw them. They _prove_ she was lying. You heard Cowan Black say it.'
Reacher nodded. 'Leaving them in the FedEx packet was neat. They looked real urgent, like they were hot off the truck. But you should have torn the label off the front. Because the thing is, FedEx charges by weight. And I weighed the packet on Alice's kitchen scales. One pound, one ounce. But the label said two pounds and nine ounces. So one of two things must have happened. Either FedEx ripped off the hospital by padding the charge, or you took out about sixty per cent of the contents and trashed them. And you know what? I vote for you checking the contents before you sent them over to us. You've been a DA for a spell, you've tried a lot of cases, you know what convincing evidence looks like. So anything about the beatings went straight in the trash. All you left were the genuine accidents. But the road rash thing passed you by, so you left the collar bone in by mistake. Or maybe you felt you _had_ to leave it in, because you know she's got a healed knot clearly visible and you figured I'd have noticed it.'
Walker said nothing. The lantern hissed.
'The broken arm, the jaw, the teeth,' Reacher said. 'My guess is there are five or six more folders in a dumpster somewhere. Probably not behind the courthouse. Probably not in your back yard, either. I guess you're smarter than that. Maybe they're in a trashcan at the bus station. Some big public place.'
Walker said nothing. The candle flames danced. Reacher smiled.
'But you were mostly pretty good,' he said. 'When I figured Carmen wasn't the shooter, you steered it straight back to a conspiracy _involving_ Carmen. You didn't miss a beat. Even when I made the link to Eugene, you kept on track. You were very shocked. You went all grey and sweaty. Not because you were upset about Al. But because he'd been found so soon. You hadn't planned on that. But still, you thought for ten seconds and came up with the IRS motive. But you know what? You were so busy thinking, you forgot to be scared enough. About the two-for-three possibility. It was a plausible threat. You should have been much more worried. Anybody else would have been.'
Walker said nothing.
'And you got Sloop out on a Sunday,' Reacher said. 'Not easy to do. But you didn't do it for him. You did it so he could be killed on a Sunday, so Carmen could be framed on a Sunday and spend the maximum time in jail before visitors could get near her the next Saturday. To give yourself five clear days to work on her.'
Walker said nothing.
'Lots of mistakes, Hack,' Reacher said. 'Including sending people after me. Like old Copernicus says, what were the chances they'd be good enough?'
Walker said nothing. Bobby was leaning forward, staring sideways across his mother, looking straight at him. Catching on, slowly.
' _You_ sent people to kill my brother?' he breathed.
'No,' Walker said. 'Reacher's wrong.'
Bobby stared at him like he'd answered _yes_ instead. 'But why _would_ you?' he asked. 'You were friends.'
Then Walker looked up, straight at Reacher. 'Yes, why _would_ I?' he said. 'What possible motive could I have?'
'Something Benjamin Franklin once wrote,' Reacher said.
'What the hell does that mean?'
'You wanted to be a judge. Not because you wanted to do good. That was all sanctimonious bullshit. It was because you wanted the trappings. You were born a poor boy and you were greedy for money and power. And it was right there in front of you. But first you had to get elected. And what sort of a thing stops a person getting elected?'
Walker just shrugged.
'Old scandals,' Reacher said. 'Among other things. Old secrets, coming back at you from the past. Sloop and Al and you were a threesome, way back when. Did all kinds of stuff together. You three against the world. You told me that. So there's Sloop, in prison for cheating on his taxes. He can't stand it in there. So he thinks, how do I get out of here? Not by repaying my debts. By figuring, my old pal Hack is running for judge this year. Big prize, all that money and power. What's he prepared to do to get it? So he calls you up and says he could start some serious rumours about some old activities if you don't broker his way out of there. You think it over carefully. You figure Sloop wouldn't incriminate _himself_ by talking about something you all did together, so at first you relax. Then you realize there's a large gap between the sort of _facts_ that would convict you and the sort of _rumours_ that would wreck your chances in the election. So you cave in. You take some of your campaign donations and arrange to pay off the IRS with it. Now Sloop's happy. But you're not. In your mind, the cat is out of the bag. Sloop's threatened you once. What about the next time he wants something? And Al's involved, because he's Sloop's lawyer. So now it's all fresh in Al's mind too. Your chances of making judge are suddenly vulnerable.'
Walker said nothing.
'You know what Ben Franklin once wrote?' Reacher asked.
'What?'
'Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.'
Silence in the room. No movement, no breathing. Just the soft hiss of the lantern and the flickering of the tiny candle flames.
'What was the secret?' Alice whispered.
'Three boys in rural Texas,' Reacher said. 'Growing up together, playing ball, having fun. They get a little older, they turn their attention to what their dads are doing. The guns, the rifles, the hunting. Maybe they start with the armadillos. They shouldn't, really, because they're protected. By the treehuggers. But the attitude is, they're on my land, they're mine to hunt. Bobby said that to me. An arrogant attitude. A _superior_ attitude. I mean, hey, what's an armadillo worth? But armadillos are slow and boring prey. Too easy. The three boys are growing up. They're three young men now. High school seniors. They want a little more excitement. So they go looking for coyotes, maybe. Worthier opponents. They hunt at night. They use a truck. They range far and wide. And soon they find bigger game. Soon they find a _real_ thrill.'
'What?'
'Mexicans,' Reacher said. 'Poor anonymous no-account brown families stumbling north through the desert at night. And I mean, hey, what are _they_ worth? Are they even human? But they make great prey. They run, and they squeal. Almost like hunting actual people, right, Hack?'
Silence in the room.
'Maybe they started with a girl,' Reacher said. 'Maybe they didn't mean to kill her. But they did anyway. Maybe they _had_ to. Couple of days, they're nervous. They hold their breath. But there's no comeback. Nobody reacts. Nobody even cares. So hey, this is suddenly _fun_. Then they're out often. It becomes a sport. The ultimate kill. Better than armadillos. They take that old pick-up, one of them driving, two of them riding in the load bed, they hunt for hours. Bobby said Sloop invented that technique. Said he was real good at it. I expect he was. I expect they all were. They got plenty of practice. They did it twenty-five times in a year.'
'That was the Border Patrol,' Bobby said.
'No, it wasn't. The report wasn't a whitewash. It didn't read like one, and the inside word is it was kosher. Sergeant Rodriguez told me that. And people like Sergeant Rodriguez _know_ things like that, believe me. The investigation got nowhere because it was looking in the wrong place. It wasn't a bunch of rogue officers. It was three local boys called Sloop Greer and Al Eugene and Hack Walker. Having fun in that old pick-up truck that's still parked in your barn. Boys will be boys, right?'
Silence in the room.
'The attacks were mostly in Echo County,' Reacher said. 'That struck me as odd. Why would the Border Patrol come so far north? Truth is, they didn't. Three Echo boys went a little ways south, instead.'
Silence.
'The attacks stopped in late August,' Reacher said. 'Why was that? Not because the investigation scared them off. They didn't _know_ about the investigation. It was because college opens early September. They went off to be freshmen. The next summer it was too dangerous or they'd grown out of it, and they didn't ever do it again. The whole thing faded into history, until twelve years later Sloop was sitting in a cell somewhere and dragged it all up because he was so desperate to get out.'
Everybody was staring straight at Walker. His eyes were closed tight and he was deathly pale.
'It seemed so unfair, right?' Reacher said to him. 'All that was way in the past. Maybe you weren't even a willing participant in the first place. Maybe the others dragged you into it. And now it was all coming back at you. It was a nightmare. It was going to ruin your life. It was going to take away the big prize. So you made some calls. Made some decisions. Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.'
Another candle died. The wick hissed and smoke plumed.
'No,' Walker said. 'It wasn't like that.'
The lantern flickered behind him. Shadows danced on the ceiling.
'So what was it like?' Reacher asked.
'I was just going to take Ellie. Just temporarily. I hired some local people to do it. I had plenty of campaign money. They watched her for a week. I went up to the jail and told Sloop, don't mess with me. But he didn't care. He said, go ahead and take Ellie. He didn't want her. He was all conflicted. He married Carmen to punish himself for what we did, I think. That's why he hit her all the time. She was a permanent reminder. He thought she could read it in him. See it in his eyes. Like voodoo. Ellie, too. He thought _she_ could see it in him. So taking her wasn't a threat to Sloop.'
'So then you hired some more people.'
Walker nodded. 'They took over and got rid of the watchers for me.'
'And then they got rid of Al and Sloop.'
'It was a long time ago, Reacher. He shouldn't have brought it up. We were kids at the time. We all agreed we would never even mention it again. We promised each other. Never, _ever_. It was the unmentionable thing. Like it had never happened. Like it was just a bad dream, a year long.'
There was silence.
'You were driving the truck tonight,' Reacher said.
Walker nodded again, slowly. 'You two, then it would have been over. I knew you knew, you see. I mean, why else would you steal the files and lead us out into the desert? So I drove the truck. Why not? I'd driven out there at night before, many times.'
Then he went quiet. Swallowed hard, twice. Closed his eyes. 'But I got scared,' he said. 'I got sick. I couldn't go through with it. Not again. I'm not that person any more. I changed.'
Silence in the room.
'Where's Ellie?' Reacher asked.
Walker shrugged and shook his head. Reacher fished in his pocket and came out with the chromium star.
'Is this thing legal?' he asked.
Walker opened his eyes. Nodded. 'Technically, I guess,' he said.
'So I'm going to arrest you.'
Walker shook his head, vaguely. 'No,' he said. 'Please.'
'Are you armed?' Reacher asked him.
Walker nodded. 'Pistol, in my pocket.'
'Get it for me, Mrs Greer,' Reacher said.
Rusty turned in her chair and went for Walker's pocket. He offered no resistance. Even leaned sideways to make it easier for her. She came out with a small blued-steel revolver. A Colt Detective Special, .38 calibre, six shots, two-inch barrel. A small weapon. Rusty cradled it in her palm, and it looked right at home in a woman's hand.
'Where's Ellie, Hack?' Reacher asked again.
'I don't know,' Walker said. 'I really don't. They use motels. I don't know which one. They wouldn't tell me. They said it's safer that way.'
'How do you contact them?'
'A Dallas number. It must be rerouted.'
'Phones are out,' Bobby said.
'Where is she, Hack?' Reacher asked again.
'I don't know. I'd tell you if I did.'
Reacher raised Alice's gun. Held it straight out across the table. His arms were long, and the muzzle came to rest two feet from Walker's face.
'Watch the trigger finger, Hack,' he said.
He tightened his finger until the skin shone white in the candlelight. The trigger moved backward, a sixteenth of an inch, then an eighth.
'You want to die, Hack?'
Walker nodded. 'Yes, please,' he whispered.
'Tell me first,' Reacher said. 'Make it right. Where is she?'
'I don't _know_ ,' Walker said.
He stared at the muzzle. It was so close, his eyes were crossing. The candle flames were reflected in the polished nickel. Reacher sighed and slackened his finger and lowered the gun all the way back to the tabletop. It hit the wood with a quiet sound. Nobody spoke. And nobody moved, until Rusty's hand came up with the tiny revolver in it. She raised it in a wavering circle and it finished up pointing at nobody in particular.
'Sloop wouldn't hit a woman,' she whispered. 'Those were all riding accidents.'
Reacher shook his head. 'He beat Carmen for five years, Rusty, almost every day they were married, until he went to jail. Broke her bones and split her lips and bruised her flesh. And that was after raping and torturing and murdering twenty-five human beings, at night, in the desert, twelve years ago.'
She trembled wildly. 'No,' she said. 'That isn't true.'
The gun wavered unsteadily.
'Point that thing at me and I'll shoot you,' Reacher said. 'Believe me, it would be an absolute pleasure.'
She stared at him for a second and then crooked her arm and touched the gun to the side of her own head, just above her ear. The metal penetrated her lacquered hair like a stick thrust through a bird's nest. She kept it there for a long moment and then pulled it away and turned and twisted in her chair and moved it again and brought it level with Hack Walker's forehead, with the muzzle no more than two inches from his skin.
'You killed my boy,' she whispered.
Walker made no attempt to move. He just nodded, very slightly. 'I'm sorry,' he whispered back.
No revolver has a safety mechanism. And a Colt Detective Special is a double-action pistol. Which means the first half of the trigger's travel clicks the hammer back and revolves the cylinder under it, and then, if you keep on pulling, the hammer drops and the gun fires.
'No, Rusty,' Reacher said.
'Mom,' Bobby called.
The hammer clicked back.
' _No_ ,' Alice shouted.
The hammer tripped. The gun fired. There was colossal noise and flame and the crown of Walker's head blasted backward into the candlelit gloom. It just came off like a lid and splintered into mist. _Colt Super Autos with hollow points_ , Reacher's subconscious mind told him. The flame died abruptly and he saw a blackened hole between Walker's eyes and his hair on fire from the muzzle flash. Then Rusty fired again. The second bullet followed the first straight through Walker's head and he went down and Rusty kept the gun rock-steady in the air above him and fired into space, three, four, five, six. The third shot splintered the wall, and the fourth hit the Coleman lantern and shattered its glass, and the fifth hit its kerosene reservoir and exploded it over a ten-foot square of wall. It blew sideways and ignited with a bright flash and the sixth shot hit the exact centre of the flames. She kept on pumping the trigger even after the gun was empty. Reacher watched her finger flexing and the hammer clicking and the cylinder stepping round obediently. Then he turned and watched the wall.
The kerosene was thicker than water and had more surface tension. It flung outward and dripped and ran and burned fiercely. It set the wall on fire immediately. The dry old wood burned with no hesitation at all. Blue flames crept upward and sideways and the faded red paint bubbled and peeled ahead of them. Tongues of flame found the vertical seams between the boards and raced up them like they were hungry. They reached the ceiling and paused momentarily and then curved horizontally and spread outward. The air in the room stirred to feed them. The candles guttered in the sudden draught. Within five seconds the wall was burning along its full height. Then the fire started creeping sideways. The flames were blue and smooth and curled and liquid, like they were sculpted out of something wet and soft. They glowed with mysterious inner light. Flakes of burning paint were drifting on hot currents and landing randomly. The fire was creeping clockwise, very fast, coming around behind everybody in the room.
'Out,' Reacher shouted.
Alice was already on her feet and Bobby was staring at the fire. Rusty was sitting absolutely motionless, still patiently working the trigger. The clicking of the firing mechanism was lost behind the crackle of the flames.
'Get her out,' Reacher shouted.
'We've got no water,' Bobby shouted back. 'The well pump won't work without electricity.'
'Just get your mother out,' Reacher shouted.
Bobby stood completely still. The flames had found the floorboards. The paint bubbled and peeled outward in a wide arc and the fire started a patient journey in pursuit. Reacher kicked chairs out of the way and lifted the table and overturned it on top of the flames. They died under it and then detoured neatly around it. The ceiling was well alight. Walker's body was sprawled on the floor near the window. His hair was still on fire from the muzzle flash. It smoked and smouldered with flames of a different colour. The fire had found the door frame. Reacher stepped across and pulled Rusty out of her chair. Spun her round and straight-armed her through the smoke and out of the room ahead of him. Alice was already in the foyer. She had the front door open. Reacher could feel damp air sucking in to feed the fire. It was keeping low, down by his feet. It was already a strong breeze.
Alice ran down the steps to the yard and Reacher pushed Rusty after her. She clattered down and staggered out onto the wet dirt and got steady on her feet and just stood there, still holding the empty gun straight out from her shoulder, still clicking the useless trigger. Walker's Lincoln was parked next to the Jeep, wet and dirty and travel-stained. Reacher ducked back inside the foyer. It was filling with smoke. It was pooling near the ceiling and crowding downward in layers. The air was hot and paint was scorching everywhere. Bobby was coughing hard near the parlour door. The parlour was already a mass of flame. An inferno. The fire was curling out of the door. The door itself was on fire. The red-framed mirror cracked in the heat and Reacher turned and saw two of himself staring back. He took a deep spluttering breath and ran toward the flames and grabbed Bobby by the wrist. Twisted his arm and grabbed the back of his belt like he was arresting him and ran him out into the darkness. Hustled him down the steps and shoved him toward the centre of the yard.
'It's burning down,' Bobby screamed. 'All of it.'
The windows were alive with yellow light. Flames were dancing behind them. Smoke was drifting through the screens and there were loud random cracking sounds from inside as timbers yielded and moved. The soaked roof was already steaming gently.
'It's burning down,' Bobby screamed again. 'What are we going to do?'
'Go live in the barn,' Reacher said. 'That's where people like you belong.'
Then he grabbed Alice's hand and ran straight for the Jeep.
SEVENTEEN
When the storm moved north the driver knew his partners weren't coming back. It was a sensation so strong it took on the weight of absolute fact. It was like the rain had left a void behind that would never be filled. He turned in his chair and stared at the motel room door. Sat like that for minutes. Then he stood up and walked over and opened it. Looked out into the parking lot, focusing left, focusing right. The blacktop was streaming with water. The air smelled sharp and clean.
He stepped outside and walked ten paces in the dark. There was a running gutter somewhere and the gurgle of street drains and loud dripping from the trees. But nothing else. Nothing else at all. Nobody was coming. Nobody was ever going to come again. He knew it. He turned round. Wet grit slid under his shoes. He walked back. Stepped inside the room and closed the door gently behind him. Looked over at the bed. Looked at the sleeping child in it.
'You drive,' he called. 'North, OK?'
He pushed her toward the driver's door and ran around the hood. She pulled her seat forward and he racked his backward. Unfolded the maps on his knees. To his left the Red House was burning fiercely. All the windows were bright with flame. Both floors now. The maid ran out of the kitchen door, wrapped in a bathrobe. The light of the fire caught her face. There was no expression on it.
'OK, let's go,' he said.
She slammed the selector into drive and gunned the motor. The transfer case was still locked in four-wheel drive and all four tyres spun and scattered wet stones and the car took off. She slewed past Walker's Lincoln. Made the right under the gate without pausing. Accelerated hard. He turned his head and saw the first flames appear at the eaves of the roof. They licked outward and paused and ran horizontally, searching for sustenance. Steam was pouring off the soaked shingles and mixing with smoke. Rusty and Bobby and the maid were watching it drift, hypnotized. He glanced away and didn't look back again. Just stared ahead and then riffed through the maps on his knees and found the large-scale sheet showing Pecos County in its entirety. Then he reached up and clicked the dome light on.
'Faster,' he said. 'I've got a real bad feeling about this.'
The four hours were long gone, but he waited anyway. He felt a certain reluctance. How could he not? He wasn't a monster. He would do what he had to do, for sure, but he wasn't going to _enjoy_ it, exactly.
He walked over and opened the door again and hung the _Do Not Disturb_ tag on the outside handle. Closed the door and locked it from the inside. He appreciated the locks motels put on their doors. A big lever to turn on the inside, a satisfying heavy _click_ , smooth and oily, no corresponding catch on the outside. It helped. Absolute undisturbed security was a useful thing. He slipped the chain on and started into the room.
Alice drove as fast as she dared. The Jeep wasn't a great road vehicle. It rolled too much and rocked violently from side to side. The steering was vague. It required constant correction. It was a problem. But Reacher ignored it and just held the map high, where it caught the light from the roof console. He stared hard at it and checked the scale and held his finger and thumb apart like a little compass and traced a circle.
'You done any tourist stuff around here?' he asked.
She nodded at the wheel. 'Some, I guess. I went to the McDonald Observatory. It was great.'
He checked the map. The McDonald Observatory was southwest of Pecos, high up in the Davis Mountains.
'That's eighty miles,' he said. 'Too far.'
'For what?'
'For them to have been today. I think they'll have been a half-hour from Pecos by road, max. Twenty-five miles, thirty tops.'
'Why?'
'To be close to Walker. He might have planned on smuggling Carmen out, if necessary. Or maybe bringing Ellie in to see her. Whatever it took to convince her that the threat was real. So I think they'll have holed up somewhere nearby.'
'And near a tourist attraction?'
'Definitely,' he said. 'That's key.'
'Can this work?' she asked. 'Finding the right place in your head?'
'It's worked for me before.'
'How many times? As a percentage?'
He ignored the question. Went back to the map. She gripped the wheel and drove. Dropped her eyes to the speedo.
'Oh _God_ ,' she whispered.
He didn't look up. 'What?'
'We're out of gas. It's right on empty. The warning light is on.'
He was quiet for a second. 'Keep going,' he said. 'We'll be OK.'
She kept her foot hard down. 'How? You think the gauge is broken?'
He looked up. Glanced ahead. 'Just keep going,' he said.
'We're going to run out,' she said.
'Don't worry,' he said.
She drove on. The car rocked hard. The headlights bounced ahead of them. The tyres whined on the streaming blacktop. She glanced down again.
'It's right on _empty_ , Reacher,' she said. ' _Below_ empty.'
'Don't worry,' he said again.
'Why not?'
'You'll see.'
He kept his eyes on the windshield. She drove on, as fast as the Jeep would go. The engine was growling loud. A gruff old straight-six, drinking gasoline at the rate of a pint every minute.
'Use two-wheel drive,' he said. 'More economical.'
She wrestled with the drivetrain lever and wrenched it forward. The front end of the car went quiet. The steering stopped fighting her. She drove on. Another half-mile. Then a mile. She glanced down at the dash again.
'We're running on fumes,' she said.
'Don't worry,' he said for the third time.
Another mile. The engine stumbled and coughed once and ran ragged for a second and then picked up again. Air in the fuel line, he thought, or sludge dredged up from the bottom of the tank.
'Reacher, we're _out of gas_ ,' Alice said.
'Don't worry about it.'
'Why not?'
Another mile.
'That's why not,' he said suddenly.
The right edge of the headlight beam washed over the ragged gravel shoulder and lit up a steel-blue Ford Crown Victoria. It had four VHF antennas on the back and no wheel covers. It was just sitting there, inert and abandoned, facing north.
'We'll use that,' he said. 'It'll have most of a tank. They were well organized.'
She braked hard and pulled in behind it. 'This is theirs? Why is it here?'
'Walker left it here.'
'How did you know?'
'It's pretty obvious. They came down from Pecos in two cars, this and the Lincoln. They dumped the Lincoln here and used the Ford the rest of the way. Then Walker ran away from the mesa, put the pick-up back in the barn, drove the Ford back up here, retrieved his Lincoln and came back down in it for our benefit. To make us think it was his first visit, if we happened to be still alive and looking.'
'What about the keys?'
'They'll be in it. Walker wasn't in the right frame of mind to worry about Hertz losing a rental car.'
Alice jumped out and checked. Gave a thumbs-up. The keys were in it. Reacher followed her with the maps. They left the Greers' Jeep with the doors standing open and the motor idling through the last of its gas. They got into the Crown Vic and he racked his seat back and she pulled hers forward. She fired it up and they were on the road again within thirty seconds, already doing sixty miles an hour.
'It's three-quarters full,' she said. 'And it drives much better.'
He nodded. It felt low and fast and smooth. Exactly like a big sedan should.
'I'm sitting where Al Eugene sat,' he said.
She glanced at him. He smiled.
'Go faster,' he said. 'Nobody will stop you. We look just like a squad car.'
She accelerated to seventy-five, then eighty. He found the dome light and clicked it on and returned to the maps.
'OK, where were we?' he said.
'The McDonald Observatory,' she said. 'You didn't like it.'
He nodded. 'It was too far out.'
He tilted the map to catch the light. Stared hard at it. _Concentrate, Reacher. Make it work. If you can_.
'What's at Balmorhea Recreation Area?' he asked.
It was still southwest of Pecos, but only thirty miles out.
_The right sort of distance_.
'It's a desert oasis,' she said. 'Like a huge lake, very clear. You can swim and scuba dive there.'
_But not the right sort of place_.
'I don't think so,' he said.
He checked northeast, up to thirty miles out.
'What about Monahans Sandhills?'
'Four thousand acres of sand dunes. Looks like the Sahara.'
'That's it? And people go there?'
'It's very impressive.'
He went quiet and checked the map all over again.
'What about Fort Stockton?' he asked.
'It's just a town,' she said. 'No different from Pecos, really.'
Then she glanced across at him. 'But _Old_ Fort Stockton is worth seeing, I guess.'
He looked at the map. Old Fort Stockton was marked as a historic ruin, north of the town itself. Nearer Pecos. He measured the distance. Maybe forty-five miles.
_Possible_.
'What is it exactly?' he asked.
'Heritage site,' she said. 'An old military fort. The Buffalo Soldiers were there. Confederates had torn the place down. The Buffaloes rebuilt it. 1867, I think.'
He checked again. The ruins were southeast of Pecos, accessible from Route 285, which looked like a decent road. Probably a fast road. Probably a _typical_ road. He closed his eyes. Alice raced on. The Crown Vic was very quiet. It was warm and comfortable. He wanted to go to sleep. He was very tired. Wet spray from the tyres hissed against the underside.
'I like the Old Fort Stockton area,' he said.
'You think they were there?'
He was quiet again, another whole mile.
'Not _there_ ,' he said. 'But nearby. Think about it, from their point of view.'
'I can't,' she said. 'I'm not like them.'
'So pretend,' he said. 'What were they?'
'I don't know.'
'They were professionals. Quiet and unobtrusive. Like chameleons. Instinctively good at camouflage. Good at not being noticed. Put yourself in their shoes, Alice.'
'I can't,' she said again.
'Think like them. Imagine. Get into it. Who are they? I saw them and thought they were a sales team. Rusty Greer thought they were social workers. Apparently Al Eugene thought they were FBI agents. So think like them. _Be_ them. Your strength is you look very normal and very ordinary. You're white, and you look very middle class, and you've got this Crown Victoria, which when it's not all tricked up with radio antennas looks like an ordinary family sedan. The FBI con helped, but basically you looked harmless enough that Al Eugene felt _safe_ to stop for you, but also somehow commanding enough that he also _had_ to. _Wanted_ to. So you're ordinary, but you're respectable and plausible. And businesslike.'
'OK.'
'But now you've got a kid with you. So what are you now?'
'What?'
'Now you're a normal, ordinary, respectable, plausible middle-class family.'
'But there were three of them.'
He was quiet a beat. Kept his eyes closed. 'One of the men was an uncle,' he said. 'You're a middle-class family, on vacation together in your sedan. But you're not a loud Disneyland type of family. You're not in shorts and brightly coloured T-shirts. You look quiet, maybe a little earnest. Maybe a little nerdy. Or maybe a little _studious_. Maybe you look like a school principal's family. Or an accountant's. You're obviously from out of state, so you're travelling. Where to? Ask yourself the same question they must have asked themselves. Where will you blend in? Where's the safest place around here? Where would an earnest, studious, middle-class family go, with their six and a half year old daughter? Where's a proper, enlightening, _educational_ kind of a place to take her? Even though she's way too young and doesn't care? Even though people laugh behind your back at how politically correct and cloyingly _diligent_ you are?'
'Old Fort Stockton,' Alice said.
'Exactly. You show the kid the glorious history of the African–American soldiers, even though you'd have a heart attack if she grew up and wanted to date one. But you're driving a Ford, not a BMW or a Cadillac. You're _sensible_. Which means not rich, basically. Careful about your expenditure. You resent overpaying for something. Motels, just as much as cars. So you drive in from the north and you stay at a place far enough out to be reasonable. Not the dumps in the middle of nowhere. But on the first distant fringes of the Fort Stockton tourist area. Where the value is good.'
He opened his eyes. 'That's where you would stay, Alice,' he said.
'It is?'
He nodded. 'A place where they get plenty of earnest, striving, not-rich middle-class families on vacation. The sort of place that gets recommended in boring AAA magazines. A place where you fit right in. A place with lots of people exactly like you. A place where you won't stand out in anybody's memory for a second. And a place where you're only thirty, thirty-five minutes from Pecos by a fast road.'
Alice shrugged and nodded all at the same time. 'Good theory, I guess,' she said. 'Good logic. Question is, were they following the same logic?'
'I hope so,' Reacher said. 'Because we don't have time for a big search. I don't think we have much time for anything. I'm getting a bad feeling. I think she's in real danger now.'
Alice said nothing.
'Maybe the others were supposed to call in regularly,' he said. 'Maybe this third guy is about to panic.'
'So it's a hell of a gamble.'
He said nothing.
'Do the math,' she said. 'A forty-five-mile radius gives you a circle over six thousand square miles in area. And you want to pick one tiny pin-point out of it?'
He was quiet again, another mile.
_Roll the dice, Reacher_.
'I think they were pretty smart and careful,' he said. 'And their priorities were pretty obvious. They were looking at the same maps we are. So I think that's how they'd have done it.'
'But are you _sure_?'
He shrugged. 'Can't ever be _sure_ ,' he said. 'But that's how _I'd_ have done it. That's the trick, Alice. Think like them. Never fails.'
'Never?'
He shrugged. 'Sometimes.'
The sleeping crossroads hamlet was dead ahead. The school, the gas station, the diner. Pecos straight on, Old Fort Stockton to the right.
'Well?' she asked.
He said nothing.
'Well?' she asked again.
He stared through the windshield.
'Decision?' she said.
He said nothing. She braked hard and skidded a yard on the soaked road and came to a complete halt right on the melted stop line.
'Well?'
_Roll the damn dice, Reacher_.
'Make the turn,' he said.
He decided to take a shower first. An excusable delay. He had time. The room was locked. The child was fast asleep. He stripped off his clothes and folded them neatly and placed them on his chair. Stepped into the bathroom. Pulled the shower curtain and set the water running.
Then he unwrapped a new bar of soap. He liked motel soaps. He liked the crisp paper packets, and the smell when you opened them. It bloomed out at you, clean and strong. He sniffed the shampoo. It was in a tiny plastic bottle. It smelled of strawberries. He read the label. _Conditioning shampoo_ , it said. He leaned in and placed the soap in the china receptacle and balanced the shampoo on the rim of the tub. Pushed the curtain aside with his forearm and stepped into the torrent.
The road northeast out of Echo was narrow and winding and clung to a hilly ridge that followed the course of the Coyanosa Draw. Now the big Ford was no longer ideal. It felt oversized and soft and ungainly. The blacktop was running with water flowing right to left across its surface. Heavy rills were pushing mud and grit over it in fan-shaped patterns. Alice was struggling to maintain forty miles an hour. She wasn't talking. Just hauling the wallowing sedan round an endless series of bends and looking pale under her tan. Like she was cold.
'You OK?' he asked.
'Are you?' she asked back.
'Why wouldn't I be?'
'You just killed two people. Then saw a third die and a house burn down.'
He glanced away. _Civilians_.
'Water under the bridge,' he said. 'No use dwelling on it now.'
'That's a hell of an answer.'
'Why?'
'Doesn't stuff like that affect you at all?'
'I'm sorry I didn't get to ask them any questions.'
'Is that all you're sorry for?'
He was quiet for a second. 'Tell me about that house you're renting,' he said.
'What's that got to do with anything?'
'My guess is it's a short-term kind of a place, people in and out all the time, not very well maintained. My guess is it was kind of dirty when you moved in.'
'So?'
'Am I right?'
She nodded at the wheel. 'I spent the first week cleaning.'
'Grease on the stove, sticky floors?'
'Yes.'
'Bugs in the closets?'
She nodded again.
'Roaches in the kitchen?'
'A colony,' she said. 'Big ones.'
'And you got rid of them?'
'Of course I did.'
'How?'
'Poison.'
'So tell me how you felt about _that_.'
She glanced sideways. 'You comparing those people to cockroaches?'
He shook his head. 'Not really. I like cockroaches better. They're just little packets of DNA scuttling around, doing what they have to do. Walker and his buddies didn't _have_ to do what they did. They had a choice. They could have been upstanding human beings. But they chose not to be. Then they chose to mess with me, which was the final straw, and they got what they got. So I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I'm not even going to give it another thought. And if you do, I think you're wrong.'
She was quiet for another twisting mile.
'You're a hard man, Reacher,' she said.
He was quiet in turn. 'I think I'm a realistic man,' he said. 'And a decent enough guy, all told.'
'You may find normal people don't agree.'
He nodded. 'A lot of you don't,' he said.
He stood in the warm water long enough to soak all over, and then he started on his hair. He lathered the shampoo into a rich halo and worked on his scalp with his fingertips. Then he rinsed his hands and soaped his face, his neck, behind his ears. He closed his eyes and let the water sluice down over his body. Used more shampoo on his chest where the hair was thick. Attended to his underarms and his back and his legs.
Then he washed his hands and his forearms very thoroughly and carefully, like he was a surgeon preparing for a procedure.
'How far now?' Alice asked.
Reacher calculated from the map. 'Twenty-five miles,' he said. 'We cross I-10 and head north on285 toward Pecos.'
'But the ruins are on the other road. The one up to Monahans.'
'Trust me, Alice. They stayed on 285. They wanted access.'
She said nothing.
'We need a plan,' Reacher said.
'For taking this guy?' she said. 'I wouldn't have a clue.'
'No, for later. For getting Carmen back.'
'You're awfully confident.'
'No point going in expecting to lose.'
She braked hard for a corner and the front end washed wide. Then the road straightened for a hundred yards and she accelerated like she was grateful for it.
'Habeas corpus,' she said. 'We'll go to a federal judge and enter an emergency motion. Tell the whole story.'
'Will that work?'
'It's exactly what habeas corpus is for. It's been working for eight hundred years. No reason it won't work this time.'
'OK,' he said.
'One thing, though.'
'What?'
'We'll need testimony. So you'll have to keep this one alive. If that's not too much to ask.'
He finished washing and just stood there in the warm stream of water. He let it flow over his body. He had a new thought in his head. He would need money. The others weren't coming back. The killing crew was history. He knew that. He was unemployed again. And he was unhappy about that. He wasn't a leader. He wasn't good at going out and creating things for himself. Teamwork had suited him just fine. Now he was back on his own. He had some money stashed under his mattress at home, but it wasn't a whole lot. He'd need more, and he'd need it pretty damn soon.
He turned round in the stall and tilted his head back and let the water wash his hair flat against his scalp. So maybe he should take the kid with him back to LA. Sell her there. He knew people. People who facilitated adoptions, or facilitated other stuff he wouldn't want to enquire too closely about. She was what? Six and a half? And white? Worth a lot of money to somebody, especially with all that fair hair. Blue eyes would have added an extra couple of grand, but whatever, she was a cute little package as she was. She might fetch a decent price, from people he knew.
But how to get her there? The Crown Vic was gone, but he could rent another car. Not like he hadn't done that plenty of times before. He could call Pecos or Fort Stockton and get one brought down, first thing in the morning. He had no end of phoney paperwork. But that would mean some delivery driver would see his face. _And the kid's_. No, he could hide her in the woman's empty room and bring the rental guy into his. But it was still a risk.
Or he could steal a car. Not like he hadn't done _that_ before, either, long ago, in his youth. He could steal one right out of the motel parking lot. He eased the shower curtain aside and leaned out for a second and checked his watch, which was resting on the vanity. _Four thirty in the morning_. They could be on the road by five. Two hours minimum before some citizen came out of his room and found his car gone. They would be a hundred miles away by then. And he had spare plates. The California issue from the original LAX rental, and the Texas issue that had come off the Crown Vic.
He got back under the shower and straightened the curtain again. His decision was made. If there was a white sedan out there, he would take it. Sedans were the most common shape in the Southwest, and white was the most common colour, because of the sun. And he could keep the kid in the trunk. No problem. A Corolla would be best, maybe a couple of years old. Very generic. Easily confused with a Geo Prizm or a dozen other cheap imports. Even traffic cops had a hard time recognizing Corollas. He could drive it all the way home. He could sell it too, as well as the kid, make a little _more_ money. He nodded to himself. Smiled and raised his arms to rinse again.
Ten miles south and west of Fort Stockton itself the road curved to the right and switchbacked over the top of the ridge and fell away down the far slope and ran parallel to the Big Canyon Draw for a spell. Then it levelled out and speared straight for the I-10 interchange which was represented on the map like a spider, with eight roads all coming together in one place. The northwest leg was Route 285 to Pecos, which showed up on paper as a ninety-degree left turn. Then there were maybe twenty miles of it between the Fort Stockton city limit and a highway bridge that recrossed the Coyanosa Draw.
'That's the target area,' Reacher said. 'Somewhere in those twenty miles. We'll drive north to the bridge and turn round and come back south. See it like they saw it.'
Alice nodded silently and accelerated down the slope. The tyres pattered on the rough surface and the big soft car pitched and rolled.
She woke up because of the noise of the shower. It drummed against the tiles on the other side of the wall and sounded a little like rain coming down on the roof again. She pulled the sheet over her head and then pulled it back down. Watched the window. There was no lightning any more. She listened hard. She couldn't hear any more thunder. Then she recognized the sound for what it was. The shower was running. In the bathroom. It was louder than hers at home, but quieter than her mom's.
The man was in the shower.
She pushed the sheet down to her waist. Struggled upright and sat there. There were no lights on in the room, but the drapes weren't drawn and a yellow glow was coming in from outside. It was wet out there. She could see raindrops on the window and reflections.
The room was empty.
_Of course it is, silly_ , she said to herself. _The man is in the shower_.
She pushed the sheet down to her ankles. Her clothes were folded on the table by the window. She crept out of the bed and tiptoed over and stretched out her hand and took her underpants from the pile. Stepped into them. Pulled her T-shirt over her head. Threaded her arms through the sleeves. Then she took her shorts and checked they were the right way round and put them on. Pulled the waistband up over her shirt and sat down cross-legged on the floor to buckle her shoes.
The shower was still running.
She stood up and crept past the bathroom door, very quietly, because she was worried about her shoes making a noise. She kept on the rug where she could. Stayed away from the linoleum. She stood still and listened.
The shower was still running.
She crept down the little hallway, past the closet, all the way to the door. It was dark back there. She stood still and looked at the door. She could see a handle, and a lever thing, and a chain thing. She thought hard. The handle was a handle, and the lever was probably a lock. She didn't know what the chain thing was for. There was a narrow slot with a wider hole at one end. She imagined the door opening. It would get a little ways and then the chain would stop it.
The shower was still running.
She had to get the chain thing off. It might slide along. Maybe that was what the narrow slot was for. She studied it. It was very high. She stretched up and couldn't really reach it. She stretched up taller and got the flat of her fingertips on it. She could slide it that way. She slid it all the way sideways until the end fell into the hole. But she couldn't pull it out.
The shower was still running.
She put her other hand flat on the door and flipped her toes over until she was right up on the points of her shoes. Stretched until her back started to hurt and picked at the chain with her fingertips. It wouldn't come out. It was hooked in. She came down off her toes and listened.
The shower was still running.
She went back on her toes and kicked and pushed against them until her legs hurt and reached up with both hands. The end of the chain was a little circle. She waggled it. It moved up a little. She let it down again. Pushed it up and picked at it at the same time and it came out. It rattled down and swung and hit the door frame with a noise that sounded very loud. She held her breath and listened.
The shower was still running.
She came down off her toes and tried the lock lever. She put her thumb on one side and her finger on the other and turned it. It wouldn't move at all. She tried it the other way. It moved a little bit. It was very stiff. She closed her mouth in case she was breathing too loud and used both hands and tried harder. It moved some more, like metal rubbing on metal. She strained at it. It hurt her hands. It moved some more. Then it suddenly clicked back all the way.
_A big click_.
She stood still and listened.
The shower was still running.
She tried the handle. It moved easily. She looked at the door. It was very high and it looked very thick and heavy. It had a thing at the top that would close it automatically behind her. It was made from metal. She had seen those things before. They made a lot of noise. The diner opposite her school had one.
_The shower had stopped_.
She froze. Stood still, blank with panic. _The door will make a noise. He'll hear it. He'll come out. He'll chase me_. She whirled round and faced the room.
The I-10 interchange was a huge concrete construction laid down like a healing scar on the landscape. It was as big as a stadium and beyond it dull orange streetlights in Fort Stockton lit up the thinning clouds. Fort Stockton still had electricity. Better power lines. Alice kept her foot hard down and screamed three-quarters of the way around the interchange and launched northwest on 285. She passed the city limit doing ninety. There was a sign: _Pecos 48 miles_. Reacher leaned forward, moving his head rapidly side to side, scanning both shoulders of the road at once. Low buildings flashed past. Some of them were motels.
'This could be entirely the wrong place,' Alice said.
'We'll know soon enough,' he replied.
He turned the water off and rattled the curtain back and stepped out of the tub. Wrapped a towel around his waist and used another to dry his face. Looked at himself in the misty mirror and combed his hair with his fingers. Strapped his watch to his wrist. Dropped both towels on the bathroom floor and took two fresh ones off the little chrome rack. Wrapped one around his waist and draped the other over his shoulder like a toga.
He stepped out of the bathroom. Light spilled out with him. It fell across the room in a broad yellow bar. He stopped dead. Stared at the empty bed.
Inside three minutes they had passed three motels and Reacher thought all three of them were wrong. It was about guessing and feeling now, about living in a zone where he was blanking out everything except the tiny murmurs from his subconscious mind. Overt analysis would ruin it. He could make a lengthy case for or against any particular place. He could talk himself into paralysis. So he was listening to nothing at all except the quiet whispers from the back of his brain. And they were saying _not that one. No. No_.
He took a dazed involuntary step toward the bed, like seeing it from a different angle might put her back in it. But nothing changed. There was just the rumpled sheet, half pushed down, half pushed aside. The pillow, at an angle, dented with the shape of her head. He turned and checked the window. It was closed tight and locked from the inside. Then he ran to the door. Short desperate steps, dodging furniture all the way. The chain was off. The lock was clicked back.
What?
He eased the handle down. Opened the door. The _Do Not Disturb_ tag was lying on the concrete walk, a foot from the doorway.
_She'd gotten out_.
He fixed the door so it wouldn't lock behind him and ran out into the night, barefoot, wearing just his towels, one around his waist and the other like a toga. He ran ten paces into the parking lot and stood still. He was panting. Shock, fear, sudden exertion. It was warm again. There was a heavy vegetable stink in the air, wet earth and flowers and leaves. Trees were dripping. He spun a complete circle. _Where the hell did she go? Where?_ A kid that age, she'd have just run for it. As fast as she could. Probably toward the road. He took a single step after her and then whirled round. Back toward the door. He'd need his clothes. Couldn't chase her in a couple of towels.
The low clumps of buildings petered out three or four miles before they were due to hit the bridge. They just stopped being there. There was just desert. He stared through the windshield into the empty distance and thought of every road he had ever seen and asked himself: _Are there going to be more buildings up ahead? Or nothing now until we hit the outskirts of Pecos thirty miles away?_
'Turn around,' he said.
'Now?'
'We've seen all we're going to see.'
She hit the brakes and pulled a violent turn, shoulder to shoulder across the road. Fishtailed a little on the wet gravel and straightened and headed back south.
'Slower now,' he said. 'Now we're them. We're looking at this with their eyes.'
Ellie was lying completely still on the high shelf in the closet. She was good at hiding. Everybody said so. She was good at climbing, too, so she liked to hide high up. Like in the horse barn. Her favourite place was high up on top of the straw bales. The closet shelf wasn't as comfortable. It was narrow and there were old dust bunnies up there. A wire coat hanger and a plastic bag with a word on it too long to read. But she could lie down flat and hide. It was a good place, she thought. Difficult to get up to. She had climbed on the smaller shelves at the side. They were like a ladder. Very high. But it was dusty. She might sneeze. She knew she mustn't. _Was she high enough?_ He wasn't a very tall man. She held her breath.
Alice kept the speed steady at sixty. The first motel they came back to was on the left side of the road. It had a low tended hedge running a hundred yards to screen the parking lot. There was a centre office and two one-storey wings of six rooms each. The office was dark. There was a soda machine next to it, glowing red. Five cars in the lot.
'No,' Reacher said. 'We don't stop at the first place we see. We'd more likely go for the second place.'
The second place was four hundred yards south.
_And it was a possibility_.
It was built at right-angles to the road. The office was face-on to the highway but the cabins ran away into the distance behind it, which made the lot U-shaped. And concealed. There were planted trees all around it, wet and dripping from the rain.
_Possible_.
Alice slowed the car to a crawl.
'Drive through,' he said.
She swung into the lot and nosed down the row. It was eight cabins long. Three cars were parked. She swung around the far end and up the other side. Eight more cabins. Another three cars. She paused alongside the office door.
'Well?' she asked.
He shook his head. 'No,' he said.
'Why not?'
'Occupancy ratio is wrong. Sixteen cabins, six cars. I'd need to see eight cars, at least.'
'Why?'
'They didn't want a place that's practically empty. Too likely to be remembered. They were looking for somewhere around two-thirds full, which would be ten or eleven cars for sixteen cabins. They've got two rooms but right now no car at all, so that would be eight or nine cars for sixteen cabins. That's the ratio we need. Two-thirds minus two. Approximately.'
She glanced across at him and shrugged. Eased back to the road and continued south.
He got a couple of paces toward the door and stopped dead. There was a yellow light off to one side of the lot, casting a low glow over the soaked blacktop. It showed him his footsteps. They were a line of curious fluid imprints blotted into the dampness. He could see his heels and his toes and his arches. Mostly toes, because he'd been running. The prints were filmy and wet. They weren't about to dry up and disappear anytime soon.
But he couldn't see _her_ footprints.
There was just one set of tracks, and they were his. No doubt about it. _She hadn't come out_. Not unless she could levitate herself and fly. Which was impossible. He smiled.
_She was hiding in the room_.
He ran the final eight steps and ducked back inside. Closed the door gently and fastened the chain and clicked the lock.
'Come on out,' he called softly.
There was no response, but he hadn't really expected one.
'I'm coming to get you,' he called.
He started by the window, where there was an upholstered chair across the corner of the room with a space behind it large enough for a kid to hide. But she wasn't there. He got on his knees and bent down and looked under the beds. Not there, either.
'Hey, kid,' he called. 'Enough already.'
There was a shared bedside cabinet with a little door. She wasn't in there. He straightened up and adjusted his towels. She wasn't in the bathroom, he knew that. So where was she? He looked around the room. _The closet. Of course_. He smiled to himself and danced over.
'Here I come, honey,' he called.
He slid the doors and checked the floor. There was a folded valise rack and nothing else. There was a set of vertical shelves on the right, nothing in them. A high shelf above, running the whole width of the space. He stretched tall and checked it out. Nothing there. Just dust bunnies and an old wire coat hanger and a plastic bag from a grocery called Subrahamian's in Cleveland.
He turned round, temporarily defeated.
The third motel had a painted sign. No neon. Just a board hung from a gallows with chains. It was carefully lettered in a script so fancy Reacher wasn't sure what it said. _Something Canyon_ , maybe, with old-fashioned spelling, _Cañon_ , like Spanish. The letters were shadowed in gold.
'I like this,' he said. 'Very tasteful.'
'Go in?' Alice asked.
'You bet.'
There was a little entrance road through twenty yards of garden. The plantings were sad and scorched by the heat, but they were an _attempt_ at something.
'I like this,' he said again.
It was the same shape as the last place. An office first, with a U-shaped parking lot snaking around two back-to-back rows of cabins set at ninety degrees to the road. Alice drove the complete circle. Ten cabins to a row, twenty in total, twelve cars parked neatly next to twelve random doors. Two Chevrolets, three Hondas, two Toyotas, two Buicks, an old Saab, an old Audi, and a five-year-old Ford Explorer.
'Two-thirds minus two,' Reacher said.
'Is this the place?' Alice asked.
He said nothing. She stopped next to the office.
'Well?'
He said nothing. Just opened the door and slid out. The heat was coming back. It was full of the smell of soaked earth. He could hear drains running and gutters dripping. The office was dark and full of shadows. The door was locked. There was a neat brass button for the night bell. He leaned his thumb on it and peered in through the window.
There was no soda machine. Just a neat counter and a large rack full of flyers. He couldn't make out what they referred to. Too dark. He kept his thumb on the bell push. A light came on in a doorway at the back of the office and a man stepped out. He was running his hand through his hair. Reacher took the Echo County deputy's star out of his pocket and clicked it flat against the glass. The man turned the office light on and walked to the door and undid the lock. Reacher stepped inside and walked past him. The flyers in the rack covered all the tourist attractions within a hundred miles. Old Fort Stockton featured prominently. There was something about a meteor crater at Odessa. All worthy stuff. Nothing about rodeos or gun shows or real estate. He waved to Alice. Gestured her in after him.
'This is the place,' he said.
'Is it?'
He nodded. 'Looks right to me.'
'You cops?' the office guy asked, looking out at the car.
'I need to see your register,' Reacher said. 'For tonight's guests.'
It was impossible. Totally impossible. She wasn't outside, she wasn't inside. He ran his eyes over the room again. The beds, the furniture, the closet. Nothing doing. She wasn't in the bathroom, because he had _been_ in the bathroom.
_Unless_ . . .
Unless she had been under the bed or in the closet and then had ducked into the bathroom while he was outside. He stepped over and opened the bathroom door. Smiled at himself in the mirror. The mist had cleared off it. He pulled back the shower curtain in one dramatic sweeping move.
'There you are,' he said.
She was pressed up into the corner of the tub, standing straight, wearing a T-shirt and shorts and shoes. The back of her right hand was jammed in her mouth. Her eyes were wide open. They were dark and huge.
'I changed my mind,' he said. 'I was going to take you with me.'
She said nothing. Just watched him. He reached out to her. She shrank back. Took the hand away from her mouth.
'It's not been four hours,' she said.
'Yes, it has,' he said. 'Way more than four.'
She put her knuckles back in her mouth. He reached out again. She shrank away. What had her mommy told her to do? _If you're worried about something, just scream and scream_. She took a deep breath and tried. But no sound would come out. Her throat was too dry.
'The register,' Reacher said again.
The office guy hesitated like there were procedures involved. Reacher checked his watch and pulled the Heckler & Koch from his pocket, all in one simple movement.
'Right now,' he said. 'We don't have time to mess about.'
The guy's eyes went wide and he ducked around the counter and reversed a big leather ledger. Pushed it toward the near edge. Reacher and Alice crowded together to look at it.
'What names?' she asked.
'No idea,' he said. 'Just look at the cars.'
There were five columns to a page. Date, name, home address, vehicle make, date of departure. There were twenty lines, for twenty cabins. Sixteen were occupied. Seven of them had arrows originating on the previous page, indicating guests who were staying a second or subsequent night. Nine cabins held new arrivals. Eleven cabins had a vehicle make entered directly against them. Four cabins were marked in two pairs of two, each sharing a vehicle.
'Families,' the night clerk said. 'Or large parties.'
'Did you check them in?' Reacher asked.
The guy shook his head. 'I'm the night man,' he said. 'I'm not here until midnight.'
Reacher stared at the page. Went very still. Looked away.
'What?' Alice said.
'This isn't the right place. This is the wrong place. I blew it.'
'Why?'
'Look at the cars,' he said.
He ran the gun muzzle down the fourth column. Three Chevrolets, three Hondas, two Toyotas, two Buicks, one Saab, one Audi. And one Ford.
'Should be two Fords,' he said. 'Their Crown Vic and the Explorer that's already parked out there.'
'Shit,' she said.
He nodded. _Shit_. He went completely blank. If this wasn't the right place, he had absolutely no idea what was. He had staked everything on it. He had no plan B. He glanced at the register. _Ford_. Pictured the old Explorer sitting out there, square and dull. Then he glanced back at the register again.
_The handwriting was all the same_.
'Who fills this out?' he asked.
'The owner,' the clerk said. 'She does everything the old-fashioned way.'
He closed his eyes. Retraced in his mind Alice's slow circle around the lot. Thought back to all the old-fashioned motels he'd used in his life.
'OK,' he said. 'The guest tells her the name and the address, she writes it down. Then maybe she just glances out of the window and writes down the vehicle make for herself. Maybe if the guests are talking or busy getting their money out.'
'Maybe. I'm the night man. I'm never here for that.'
'She's not really into automobiles, is she?'
'I wouldn't know. Why?'
'Because there are three Chevrolets in the book and only two in the lot. I think she put the Explorer down as a Chevy. It's an old model. Kind of angular. Maybe she confused it with an old-model Blazer or something.'
He touched the gun muzzle to the word _Ford_.
'That's the Crown Vic,' he said. 'That's them.'
'You think?' Alice said.
'I know. I can feel it.'
They had taken two rooms, not adjacent, but in the same wing. Rooms five and eight.
'OK,' he said again. 'I'm going to take a look.'
He pointed to the night guy. 'You stay here and keep quiet.'
Then he pointed to Alice. 'You call the State Police and start doing your thing with the federal judge, OK?'
'You need a key?' the night clerk asked.
'No,' Reacher said. 'I don't need a key.'
Then he walked out into the damp warmth of the night.
The right-hand row of cabins started with number one. There was a concrete walkway leading past each door. He moved quickly and quietly along it and his shoes left damp prints all the way. There was nothing to see except doors. They came at regular intervals. No windows. The windows would be at the back. These were standard-issue motel rooms, like he had seen a million times before, no doubt about it. Standard layout, with a door, a short hallway, closet on one side and bathroom on the other, the hallway opening out into a room occupying the full width of the unit, two beds, two chairs, a table, a credenza, air conditioner under the window, pastel pictures on the wall.
Cabin number five had a _Do Not Disturb_ tag lying on the concrete a foot from the doorway. He stepped over it. _If you've got a stolen kid, you keep her in the room farthest from the office. No-brainer_. He walked on and stopped outside number eight. Put his ear to the crack of the door and listened. Heard nothing. He walked silently on, past number nine, past ten, to the end of the row. Walked round the bend of the U. The two cabin blocks were parallel, facing each other across a thirty-foot-wide rectangle of garden. It was desert horticulture, with low spiky plants growing out of raked gravel and crushed stone. There were small yellow lanterns here and there. Large rocks and boulders, carefully placed, like a Japanese effect.
The crushed stone was noisy under his feet. He had to walk slow. He passed by ten's window, then nine's, then crouched low and eased against the wall. Crawled forward and positioned himself directly under eight's window sill. The air conditioner was running loud. He couldn't hear anything over it. He raised his head, slowly and carefully. Looked into the room.
Nothing doing. The room was completely empty. It was completely undisturbed. It might never have been occupied. It was just sitting there, still and sterile, cleaned and readied, the way motel rooms are. He felt a flash of panic. _Maybe they made multiple bookings all over the place. Two or three similar places, to give themselves a choice. Thirty or forty bucks a night, why not?_ He stood up straight. Stopped worrying about the noise from the gravel. Ran past seven and six, straight to five's window. Put himself right in front of it and looked in.
_And saw a small dark man wearing two white towels dragging Ellie out of the bathroom_. Bright light was spilling out behind him. He had both her wrists caught in one hand above her head. She was kicking and bucking violently in his grip. Reacher stared in for maybe a quarter of a second, long enough to sense the layout of the room and see a black nine-millimetre handgun with a silencer lying on the credenza. Then he took a breath and one long fluid step away and bent down and picked up a rock from the garden. It was bigger than a basketball and could have weighed a hundred pounds. He heaved it straight through the window. The screen disintegrated and glass shattered and he followed it headfirst into the room with the window frame caught around his shoulders like a wreath of victory.
The small dark man froze in shock for a split second and then let Ellie go and turned and scrabbled desperately toward the credenza. Reacher batted away the splintered frame and got there first and caught him by the throat with his right hand and jammed him back against the wall and followed up with a colossal left to the gut and let him fall and kicked him once in the head, very hard. Saw his eyes roll up into his skull. Then he breathed in and out like a train and gasped and shuffled his feet and flexed his hands and fought the temptation to kick him to death.
Then he turned to Ellie.
'You OK?' he asked.
She nodded. Paused in the sudden silence. 'He's a bad man,' she said. 'I think he was going to _shoot_ me.'
He paused in turn. Fought to control his breathing. 'He can't do that now,' he said.
'There was thunder and lightning.'
'I heard it too. I was outside. Got all wet.'
She nodded. 'It rained a whole lot.'
'You OK?' he asked for the second time.
She just thought about it and nodded. She was very composed. Very serious. No tears, no screaming. The room went absolutely quiet. The action had lasted all of three seconds, beginning to end. It was like it hadn't happened at all. But the rock from the garden was lying there in the middle of the floor, nested in shards of broken glass. He picked it up and carried it to the shattered window and tipped it through. It crunched on the gravel and rolled away.
'You OK?' he asked for the third time.
Ellie shook her head. 'I need to go to the bathroom,' she said.
He smiled. 'Go right ahead.' He picked up the phone and dialled zero. The night guy answered. Reacher told him to send Alice down to room five. Then he walked over and unlatched the chain and unlocked the door. Left it propped open. It set up a breeze, all the way through the room to the broken window. The outside air was damp. And warm. Warmer than the inside air.
Ellie came out of the bathroom.
'You OK?' he asked for the fourth time.
'Yes,' she said. 'I'm OK.'
Alice stepped inside a minute later. Ellie looked at her, curiously.
'This is Alice,' Reacher said. 'She's helping your mom.'
'Where is my mom?'
'She'll be with you soon,' Alice said.
Then she turned and looked down at the small dark guy. He was inert on the floor, pressed up against the wall, arms and legs tangled.
'Is he alive?' she whispered.
Reacher nodded. 'Concussed, is all. I think. I hope.'
'State Police is responding,' she whispered. 'And I called my boss at home. Got him out of bed. He's setting up a chambers meeting with a judge, first thing. But he says we'll need a straightforward confession from this guy if we want to avoid a big delay.'
Reacher nodded. 'We'll get one.'
He bent down and twisted one of the small dark man's towels tight around his neck like a noose and used it to drag him across the floor and into the bathroom.
Twenty minutes later he came out again and found two State cops standing in the room. A sergeant and a trooper, both Hispanic, both composed and immaculate in their tan uniforms. He could hear their car idling outside the door. He nodded to them and walked over and picked up the driver's clothes from the chair. Tossed them back into the bathroom.
'So?' the sergeant said.
'He's ready to talk,' Reacher said. 'He's offering a full and voluntary confession. But he wants you to understand he was just the driver.'
'He wasn't a shooter?'
Reacher shook his head. 'But he saw everything.'
'What about the kidnap?'
'He wasn't there. He was guarding her afterwards, is all. And there's a lot of other stuff, too, going back a number of years.'
'Situation like this, he talks, he's going away for a long time.'
'He knows that. He accepts it. He's happy about it. He's looking for redemption.'
The cops just glanced at each other and went into the bathroom. Reacher heard people shuffling and moving around and handcuffs clicking.
'I have to get back,' Alice said. 'I have to prepare the writ. Lot of work involved, with habeas corpus.'
'Take the Crown Vic,' Reacher said. 'I'll wait here with Ellie.'
The cops brought the driver out of the bathroom. He was dressed and his hands were cuffed behind him and each cop had hold of an elbow. He was bent over and white with pain and already talking fast. The cops hustled him straight out to their cruiser and the room door swung shut behind them. There was the muffled sound of car doors slamming and the growl of an engine.
'What did you do to him?' Alice whispered.
Reacher shrugged. 'I'm a hard man. Like you said.'
He asked her to send the night clerk down with a master key and she walked away toward the office. He turned to Ellie.
'You OK?' he said.
'You don't need to keep asking me,' she replied.
'Tired?'
'Yes,' she said.
'Your mom will come soon,' he said. 'We'll wait for her right here. But let's change rooms, shall we? This one's got a broken window.'
She giggled. 'You broke it. With that rock.'
He heard the Crown Vic start up in the distance. Heard its tyres on the road.
'Let's try room eight,' he said. 'It's nice and clean. Nobody's been in it. It can be ours.'
She took his hand and they walked out together and along the concrete walkway to number eight, a dozen steps for him, three dozen for her, damp filmy tracks left in the wet behind both of them. The clerk met them with a pass key and Ellie got straight into the bed nearest the window. Reacher lay down on the other and watched her until she was sound asleep. Then he wrapped his arm under his head and tried to doze.
Less than two hours later the new day dawned bright and hot and the air stirred and the metal roof clicked and cracked and the timbers under it creaked and moved. Reacher opened his eyes after a short uneasy rest and swung his legs to the floor. Crept quietly to the door and opened it up and stepped outside. The eastern horizon was far off to his right beyond the motel office. It was flaring with pure white light. There were rags of old cloud in the sky. They were burning off as he watched. _No storm today_. People had talked about it for a week, but it wasn't going to happen. Last night's hour of rain was all it was ever going to be. A complete misfire.
He crept back into the room and lay down again. Ellie was still asleep. She had kicked the sheet down and her shirt had ridden up and he could see the plump band of pink skin at her waist. Her legs were bent, like she had been running in her dreams. But her arms were thrown up above her head, which some Army psychiatrist had once told him was a sign of security. _A kid sleeps like that_ , he had said, _deep down it feels safe. Safe?_ She was some kid. That was for damn sure. Most adults he knew would be wrecks after an experience like hers. For weeks. Or longer. But she wasn't. Maybe she was too young to fully comprehend. Or maybe she was just a tough kid. One or the other. He didn't know. He had no experience. He closed his eyes again.
He opened them for the second time thirty minutes later because Ellie was standing right next to him, shaking his shoulder.
'I'm hungry,' she said.
'Me too,' he said back. 'What would you like?'
'Ice cream,' she said.
'For breakfast?'
She nodded.
'OK,' he said. 'But eggs first. Maybe bacon. You're a kid. You need good nutrition.'
He fumbled the phone book out of the bedside drawer and found a diner listed that was maybe a mile nearer Fort Stockton. He called them and bribed them with the promise of a twenty dollar tip to drive breakfast out to the motel. He sent Ellie into the bathroom to get washed up. By the time she came out, the food had arrived. Scrambled eggs, smoked bacon, toast, jelly, cola for her, coffee for him. And a huge plastic dish of ice cream with chocolate sauce.
Breakfast changes everything. He ate the food and drank the coffee and felt some energy coming back. Saw the same effect in Ellie. They propped the room door wide open while they ate to smell the morning air. Then they dragged chairs out to the concrete walk and set them side by side and sat down to wait.
They waited more than four hours. He stretched out and idled the time away like he was accustomed to doing. She waited like it was a serious task to be approached with her usual earnest concentration. He called the diner again halfway through and they ate a second breakfast, identical menu to the first. They went in and out to the bathroom. Talked a little. Tried to identify the trees, listened to the buzz of the insects, looked for clouds in the sky. But mostly they kept their gaze ahead and half right, where the road came in from the north. The ground was dry again, like it had never rained at all. The dust was back. It plumed off the blacktop and hung in the heat. It was a quiet road, maybe one vehicle every couple of minutes. Occasionally a small knot of traffic, stalled behind a slow-moving farm truck.
A few minutes after eleven o'clock Reacher was standing a couple of paces into the lot and he saw the Crown Vic coming south in the distance. It crept slowly out of the haze. He saw the fake antennas wobbling and flexing behind it. Dust trailing in the air.
'Hey, kid,' he called. 'Check this out.'
She stood next to him and shaded her eyes with her hand. The big car slowed and turned in and drove up right next to them. Alice was in the driver's seat. Carmen was next to her. She looked pale and washed out but she was smiling and her eyes were wide with joy. She had the door open before the car stopped moving and she came out and skipped around the hood and Ellie ran to her and jumped into her arms. They staggered around together in the sunlight. There was shrieking and crying and laughter all at the same time. He watched for a moment and then backed away and squatted next to the car. He didn't want to intrude. He guessed times like these were best kept private. Alice saw what he was thinking and buzzed her window down and put her hand on his shoulder.
'Everything squared away?' he asked her.
'For us,' she said. 'Cops have got a lot of paperwork ahead. All in all they're looking at more than fifty homicides in seven separate states. Including what happened here twelve years ago and Eugene and Sloop and Walker himself. They're going to arrest Rusty for shooting Walker. But she'll get off easy, I should think, in the circumstances.'
'Anything about me?'
'They were asking about last night. Lots of questions. I said I did it all.'
'Why?'
She smiled. 'Because I'm a lawyer. I called it self-defence and they bought it without hesitating. It was my car out there, and my gun. No-brainer. They'd have given you a much harder time.'
'So we're all home free?'
'Especially Carmen.'
He looked up. Carmen had Ellie on her hip, with her face buried in her neck like the sweet fragrance of her was necessary to sustain life itself. She was walking aimless random circles with her. Then she raised her head and squinted against the sun and smiled with such abandoned joy that Reacher found himself smiling along with her.
'She got plans?' he asked.
'Moving up to Pecos,' Alice said. 'We'll sort through Sloop's affairs. There's probably some cash somewhere. She's talking about moving into a place like mine. Maybe working part-time. Maybe even looking at law school.'
'You tell her about the Red House?'
'She laughed with happiness. I told her it was probably burned down to a cinder, and she just laughed and laughed. I felt good for her.'
Now Ellie was leading her by the hand around the parking lot, checking out the trees she had inspected previously, talking a mile a minute. They looked perfect together. Ellie was hopping with energy and Carmen looked serene and radiant and very beautiful. Reacher stood up and leaned against the car.
'You want lunch?'
'Here?'
'I've got a thing going with a diner. They've probably got vegetables.'
'Tuna salad will do it for me.'
He went inside and used the phone. Ordered three sandwiches and promised yet another twenty bucks for the tip. Came out and found Ellie and Carmen looking for him.
'I'm going to a new school soon,' Ellie said. 'Just like you did.'
'You'll do great,' he said. 'You're smart as a whip.'
Then Carmen let go of her daughter's hand and stepped near him, a little shy and silent and awkward for a second. Then she smiled wide and put her arms around his chest and hugged him hard.
'Thanks,' was all she said.
He hugged her back. 'I'm sorry it took so long.'
'Did my clue help?'
'Clue?' he said.
'I left a clue for you.'
'Where?'
'In the confession.'
He said nothing. She unwound herself from his embrace and took his arm and led him to where Ellie wouldn't hear her.
'He made me say I was a whore.'
He nodded.
'But I pretended to be nervous and I got the words wrong. I said street stroller.'
He nodded again. 'I remember.'
'But it's really streetwalker, isn't it? To be correct? That was the clue. You were supposed to think to yourself, it's not _stroller_ , it's _walker_. Get it? _It's Walker_. Meaning it's Hack Walker doing all of this.'
He went very quiet.
'I missed that,' he said.
'So how did you know?'
'I guess I took the long way round.'
She just smiled again. Laced her arm into his and walked him back to the car, where Ellie was laughing with Alice.
'You going to be OK?' he asked her.
She nodded. 'But I feel very guilty. People died.'
He shrugged. 'Like Clay Allison said.'
'Thanks,' she said again.
' _No hay de qué, señora_.'
'Señorita,' she said.
Carmen and Ellie and Alice drifted inside to get washed up for lunch. He watched the door close behind them and just walked away. It seemed like the natural thing to do. He didn't want anybody to try to keep him there. He jogged to the road and turned south. Walked a whole hot mile before he got a ride from a farm truck driven by a toothless old man who didn't talk much. He got out at the I-10 interchange and waited on the west ramp for ninety minutes in the sun until an eighteen-wheeler slowed and stopped next to him. He walked around the massive hood and looked up at the window. The window came down. He could hear music over the loud shudder of the diesel. It sounded like Buddy Holly. The driver leaned out. He was a guy of about fifty, fleshy, wearing a Dodgers T-shirt and about four days' growth of beard.
'Los Angeles?' he called.
'Anywhere,' Reacher called back.
_About the Author_
**Lee Child** is one of the world's leading thriller writers. His novels consistently achieve the number one slot in hardback and paperback on bestsellers lists on both sides of the Atlantic, and are translated into over forty languages. Born in Coventry, he now lives in America.
Visit www.jackreacher.co.uk
Have you read them all?
KILLING FLOOR
Jack Reacher gets off a bus in a small town in Georgia. And is thrown into the county jail, for a murder he didn't commit.
DIE TRYING
Reacher is locked in a van with a woman claiming to be FBI. And ferried right across America into a brand new country.
TRIPWIRE
Reacher is digging swimming pools in Key West when a detective comes round asking questions. Then the detective turns up dead.
THE VISITOR
Two naked women found dead in a bath filled with paint. Both victims of a man just like Reacher.
ECHO BURNING
In the heat of Texas, Reacher meets a young woman whose husband is in jail. When he is released, he will kill her.
WITHOUT FAIL
A Washington woman asks Reacher for help. Her job? Protecting the Vice-President.
PERSUADER
A kidnapping in Boston. A cop dies. Has Reacher lost his sense of right and wrong?
THE ENEMY
Back in Reacher's army days, a general is found dead on his watch.
ONE SHOT
A lone sniper shoots five people dead in a heartland city. But the accused guy says, 'Get Reacher'.
THE HARD WAY
A coffee on a busy New York street leads to a shoot-out three thousand miles away in the Norfolk countryside.
BAD LUCK AND TROUBLE
One of Reacher's buddies has shown up dead in the California desert, and Reacher must put his old army unit back together.
NOTHING TO LOSE
Reacher crosses the line between a town called Hope and one named Despair.
GONE TOMORROW
On the New York subway, Reacher counts down the twelve tell-tale signs of a suicide bomber.
61 HOURS
In freezing South Dakota, Reacher hitches a lift on a bus heading for trouble.
WORTH DYING FOR
Reacher falls foul of a local clan that has terrified an entire Nebraska county into submission.
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
A Random House Group Company
www.transworldbooks.co.uk
ECHO BURNING
A BANTAM BOOK : 9780857500083
**Version 1.0 Epub ISBN: 9781407070261**
First published in Great Britain
in 2001 by Bantam Press
a division of Transworld Publishers
Bantam edition published 2002
Copyright © Lee Child 2001
Lee Child has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author
of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of
historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the
UK can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk
The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009.
12 14 16 18 20 19 17 15 13 11
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Q: UIWebView not calling shouldStartLoadWithRequest when link is clicked || Capturing link clicks in UIWebView So this question requires more web knowledge than cocoa knowledge. I know only the basics of web am stumped. This is also a bit of an edge case (although my sample size is small).
I'm playing around with a feature to cross-post videos from youtube into our app.
So I have a browserController and I load http://m.youtube.com and it loads fine. shouldStartLoadWithRequest is called upon initial load. However, if I click a link to go to a video's page shouldStartLoadWithRequest is never called.
I've tried out a couple other sites (nba.com and vimeo.com) and they work as expected, shouldStartLoadWithRequest IS called when a link is clicked, so that leads me to believe there's nothing wrong with my browserController nor my UIWebView code and it's something particular to the way the youtube site is handling it's link clicks.
Any idea what's going on and how to either make sure shouldStartLoadWithRequest is called or else listen to the link click otherwise?
PS. I had no idea how to tag this so that it refers to which web frameworks this might involve.
A: I decided to go a different route and created an NSTimer that periodically grabs the current url using javascript. When it changes, I know the page switched. I disable the timer briefly if shouldStartLoadWithRequest is called. I reenable it on successful load.
It's not perfect, but works well enough for my needs and works on m.youtube.com. I imagine there is some more advanced javascript that could specifically get the link clicks also, but just checking for url updates works ok.
// assume self.currentURL and self.updateTimer exist in controller
// check every 2 seconds
-(void) startTimer {
[self stopTimer];
self.updateTimer = [NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:2.0
target:self
selector:@selector(timerUpdate)
userInfo:nil
repeats:YES];
}
-(void) stopTimer {
[self.updateTimer invalidate];
self.updateTimer = nil;
}
-(void) timerUpdate {
NSString *title = [self.webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"document.title"];
NSString *url = [self.webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"document.URL"];
if (![url isEqualToString:self.currentURL]) {
NSLog(@"New URL: %@", url);
self.currentURL = url;
}
// update back/forward buttons here
}
UPDATE: Unfortunately all the solutions for this particular problem right now are a little bit of a hack. This talk gives some other ideas: http://vimeo.com/61488911
Options boil down to:
*
*javascript injection to capture the page changes (read up on history.pushState).
*KVO to watch for changes to the webview (like the scrollview resizing)
*watching for the title change, as above.
*checking for updates every time the user taps the view.
Use whichever one makes sense for your needs.
A: Try the answers in these similar issues:
shouldStartLoadWithRequest is never called
Undeclared delegate and shouldStartLoadWithRequest
And make sure you set your delegate.
webview.delegate = self;
Also, look here: UIWebView Link Click
In a comment one person stated: Actually it won't always be called. For example, in some m.youtube.com pages.
In multiple question i continueally see that this will not work in m.youtube.com . Like in this post: iPhone - UIWebview - Get the URL of the link clicked
A: http://m.youtube.com processes all the links via AJAX. But shouldStartLoadWithRequest is not called for XHR requests. You need to inject JavaScript code that would reload page (see Knowing when AJAX has loaded in UIWebView for UIWebView) or send messages to native application (see How can i monitor requests on WKWebview? for WkWebView) after each XHR request.
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Phalangopora regularis är en nässeldjursart som beskrevs av James Barrie Kirkpatrick 1897. Phalangopora regularis ingår i släktet Phalangopora och familjen Stylasteridae.
Artens utbredningsområde är Indiska oceanen. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.
Källor
Hydrozoer
regularis | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
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How to approach writing a song
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Home peyton jones how to write a paper Provide a synopsis of the jones and shephard case
Provide a synopsis of the jones and shephard case
What areas need to be addressed for the transition and how will they benefit the company. The setup is that the protagonist Merlin must secretly use his magic to protect ArthurThe Chosen One who is destined to reign over a fair and just Camelot.
They were bound to serve for life or until old age inhibited their ability to fight, and any attempts at desertion were met with an assassin squad. Thesis, University of Oxford.
Damon, Robert, Robert Damon,was a well-known Dorset geologist and collector of and dealer in fossils. Four approximately 2 km lengths are reproduced as Figure 2 a-d. About three weeks more of very favourable and pleasant weather conveyed them to Rio de Janeiro. Comparisons of the changes in beach crest height along a The NERV's special agents.
Sharpe features a subversion: The Bridport Road became impassable. Vegetables not having been so plentiful at Santa Cruz as to afford a sufficient supply, it was the intention of Governor Phillip to anchor for about twenty-four hours in the Bay of Port Praya.
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But, unmoved by any consideration except that of expedience, Governor Phillip persisted in conducting his ships to their next intended station, the harbour of Rio de Janeiro. For example, Gray p. The significance of wave parameters in the sorting of beach pebbles.
A particularly infuriating example: Fair, John and Moxam, Don. Index of articles by issue Not all articles listed are available to read on our website, and many back issues are no longer available in print format.
The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay with an Account of the Establishment of the Colonies of Port Jackson and Norfolk Island; compiled from Authentic Papers. Dec 10, · PROJ Week 1 Checkpoint Solution. 1. Provide a synopsis of the Jones and Shephard case.
2. Highlight three enterprise management causes/considerations and three project management causes/considerations for the situation. Search the world's information, including webpages, images, videos and more.
Google has many special features to help you find exactly what you're looking for. Chesil Beach or Chesil Bank - Bibliography and References. Adlam, W.J. The origin and source of the features of Chesil Beach, Dorset. Southern Geographer, 2, 1.
1. Provide a synopsis of the Jones and Shephard case. 2. Highlight three enterprise management causes/considerations and three project management causes/considerations for the situation.
Include what seemed to be missing.
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PROJ Week All Checkpoints % Correct Answers | {
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Q: SwiftUI recording video with live preview Trying to make screen that allows user to record video with 30-second timer, and then I want to send it on server. The problem is delegate method is not called (see 2nd code part).
What I did, is PreviewView as UIView, time and session settings. Even when I check captureSession.isRecording its shows false
UPDATED:
ViewRepresentable
struct VideoRecordingView: UIViewRepresentable {
@Binding var timeLeft: Int
@Binding var onComplete: Bool
@Binding var recording: Bool
func makeUIView(context: UIViewRepresentableContext<VideoRecordingView>) -> PreviewView {
let recordingView = PreviewView()
recordingView.onComplete = {
self.onComplete = true
}
recordingView.onRecord = { timeLeft, totalShakes in
self.timeLeft = timeLeft
self.recording = true
}
recordingView.onReset = {
self.recording = false
self.timeLeft = 30
}
return recordingView
}
func updateUIView(_ uiViewController: PreviewView, context: UIViewRepresentableContext<VideoRecordingView>) {
}
}
View
extension PreviewView: AVCaptureFileOutputRecordingDelegate{
func fileOutput(_ output: AVCaptureFileOutput, didFinishRecordingTo outputFileURL: URL, from connections: [AVCaptureConnection], error: Error?) {
print(outputFileURL.absoluteString) // Not called
}
}
class PreviewView: UIView {
private var captureSession: AVCaptureSession?
private var shakeCountDown: Timer?
let videoFileOutput = AVCaptureMovieFileOutput()
var recordingDelegate:AVCaptureFileOutputRecordingDelegate!
var recorded = 0
var secondsToReachGoal = 30
var onRecord: ((Int, Int)->())?
var onReset: (() -> ())?
var onComplete: (() -> ())?
init() {
super.init(frame: .zero)
var allowedAccess = false
let blocker = DispatchGroup()
blocker.enter()
AVCaptureDevice.requestAccess(for: .video) { flag in
allowedAccess = flag
blocker.leave()
}
blocker.wait()
if !allowedAccess {
print("!!! NO ACCESS TO CAMERA")
return
}
// setup session
let session = AVCaptureSession()
session.beginConfiguration()
let videoDevice = AVCaptureDevice.default(.builtInWideAngleCamera,
for: .video, position: .front)
guard videoDevice != nil, let videoDeviceInput = try? AVCaptureDeviceInput(device: videoDevice!), session.canAddInput(videoDeviceInput) else {
print("!!! NO CAMERA DETECTED")
return
}
session.addInput(videoDeviceInput)
session.commitConfiguration()
self.captureSession = session
}
override class var layerClass: AnyClass {
AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer.self
}
required init?(coder: NSCoder) {
fatalError("init(coder:) has not been implemented")
}
var videoPreviewLayer: AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer {
return layer as! AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer
}
override func didMoveToSuperview() {
super.didMoveToSuperview()
recordingDelegate = self
startTimers()
startRecording()
if nil != self.superview {
self.videoPreviewLayer.session = self.captureSession
self.videoPreviewLayer.videoGravity = .resizeAspect
self.captureSession?.startRunning()
} else {
self.captureSession?.stopRunning()
}
}
private func onTimerFires(){
print(" RECORDING \(videoFileOutput.isRecording)")
secondsToReachGoal -= 1
recorded += 1
onRecord?(secondsToReachGoal, recorded)
if(secondsToReachGoal == 0){
stopRecording()
shakeCountDown?.invalidate()
shakeCountDown = nil
onComplete?()
videoFileOutput.stopRecording()
}
}
func startTimers(){
if shakeCountDown == nil {
shakeCountDown = Timer.scheduledTimer(withTimeInterval: 1, repeats: true) { [weak self] (timer) in
self?.onTimerFires()
}
}
}
func startRecording(){
captureSession?.addOutput(videoFileOutput)
let documentsURL = FileManager.default.urls(for: .documentDirectory, in: .userDomainMask)[0]
let filePath = documentsURL.appendingPathComponent("tempPZDC")
videoFileOutput.startRecording(to: filePath, recordingDelegate: recordingDelegate)
}
func stopRecording(){
videoFileOutput.stopRecording()
print(" RECORDING \(videoFileOutput.isRecording)")
}
}
A: You need to call self.captureSession?.startRunning() just before you call startRecording()
A: Here's a working example of recording. Tap Toggle Completion to stop recording.
import SwiftUI
import AVKit
struct RecordingView: View {
@State private var timer = 5
@State private var onComplete = false
@State private var recording = false
var body: some View {
ZStack {
VideoRecordingView(timeLeft: $timer, onComplete: $onComplete, recording: $recording)
VStack {
Button(action: {
self.recording.toggle()
}, label: {
Text("Toggle Recording")
})
.foregroundColor(.white)
.padding()
Button(action: {
self.timer -= 1
print(self.timer)
}, label: {
Text("Toggle timer")
})
.foregroundColor(.white)
.padding()
Button(action: {
self.onComplete.toggle()
}, label: {
Text("Toggle completion")
})
.foregroundColor(.white)
.padding()
}
}
}
}
struct RecordingView_Previews: PreviewProvider {
static var previews: some View {
RecordingView()
}
}
struct VideoRecordingView: UIViewRepresentable {
@Binding var timeLeft: Int
@Binding var onComplete: Bool
@Binding var recording: Bool
func makeUIView(context: UIViewRepresentableContext<VideoRecordingView>) -> PreviewView {
let recordingView = PreviewView()
recordingView.onComplete = {
self.onComplete = true
}
recordingView.onRecord = { timeLeft, totalShakes in
self.timeLeft = timeLeft
self.recording = true
}
recordingView.onReset = {
self.recording = false
self.timeLeft = 30
}
return recordingView
}
func updateUIView(_ uiViewController: PreviewView, context: UIViewRepresentableContext<VideoRecordingView>) {
}
}
extension PreviewView: AVCaptureFileOutputRecordingDelegate{
func fileOutput(_ output: AVCaptureFileOutput, didFinishRecordingTo outputFileURL: URL, from connections: [AVCaptureConnection], error: Error?) {
print(outputFileURL.absoluteString)
}
}
class PreviewView: UIView {
private var captureSession: AVCaptureSession?
private var shakeCountDown: Timer?
let videoFileOutput = AVCaptureMovieFileOutput()
var recordingDelegate:AVCaptureFileOutputRecordingDelegate!
var recorded = 0
var secondsToReachGoal = 30
var onRecord: ((Int, Int)->())?
var onReset: (() -> ())?
var onComplete: (() -> ())?
init() {
super.init(frame: .zero)
var allowedAccess = false
let blocker = DispatchGroup()
blocker.enter()
AVCaptureDevice.requestAccess(for: .video) { flag in
allowedAccess = flag
blocker.leave()
}
blocker.wait()
if !allowedAccess {
print("!!! NO ACCESS TO CAMERA")
return
}
// setup session
let session = AVCaptureSession()
session.beginConfiguration()
let videoDevice = AVCaptureDevice.default(.builtInWideAngleCamera,
for: .video, position: .front)
guard videoDevice != nil, let videoDeviceInput = try? AVCaptureDeviceInput(device: videoDevice!), session.canAddInput(videoDeviceInput) else {
print("!!! NO CAMERA DETECTED")
return
}
session.addInput(videoDeviceInput)
session.commitConfiguration()
self.captureSession = session
}
override class var layerClass: AnyClass {
AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer.self
}
required init?(coder: NSCoder) {
fatalError("init(coder:) has not been implemented")
}
var videoPreviewLayer: AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer {
return layer as! AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer
}
override func didMoveToSuperview() {
super.didMoveToSuperview()
recordingDelegate = self
startTimers()
if nil != self.superview {
self.videoPreviewLayer.session = self.captureSession
self.videoPreviewLayer.videoGravity = .resizeAspect
self.captureSession?.startRunning()
self.startRecording()
} else {
self.captureSession?.stopRunning()
}
}
private func onTimerFires(){
print(" RECORDING \(videoFileOutput.isRecording)")
secondsToReachGoal -= 1
recorded += 1
onRecord?(secondsToReachGoal, recorded)
if(secondsToReachGoal == 0){
stopRecording()
shakeCountDown?.invalidate()
shakeCountDown = nil
onComplete?()
videoFileOutput.stopRecording()
}
}
func startTimers(){
if shakeCountDown == nil {
shakeCountDown = Timer.scheduledTimer(withTimeInterval: 1, repeats: true) { [weak self] (timer) in
self?.onTimerFires()
}
}
}
func startRecording(){
captureSession?.addOutput(videoFileOutput)
let documentsURL = FileManager.default.urls(for: .documentDirectory, in: .userDomainMask)[0]
let filePath = documentsURL.appendingPathComponent("tempPZDC")
videoFileOutput.startRecording(to: filePath, recordingDelegate: recordingDelegate)
}
func stopRecording(){
videoFileOutput.stopRecording()
print(" RECORDING \(videoFileOutput.isRecording)")
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 1,746 |
{"url":"https:\/\/www.physicsforums.com\/threads\/4th-order-variation-of-parameters.546112\/","text":"# 4th Order Variation of Parameters\n\n1. Oct 31, 2011\n\n### VitaX\n\nFind the complementary solution of $y^\\left(4\\right) + 2y'' + y = sint$\n\nHomogeneous Form would be $y^\\left(4\\right) + 2y'' + y = 0$\n\n$r^4 + 2r^2 + r = 0 \\rightarrow r(r^3 + 2r + 1) = 0$\n\nThis is where I'm stuck. Once I find $y_c(t)$ I should be able to finish the problem, but I'm having trouble at this step. What would be the next step here?\n\nThe book's solution is $y_c(t) = C_1 cost + C_2 sint + C_3 tcost + C_4 tsint$ which would suggest complex numbers involved here.\n\nEdit: Found my error, it was in the r equation.\n\nLast edited: Nov 1, 2011\n2. Nov 1, 2011\n\n### lurflurf\n\n(D4+2D2+1)=(D2+1)2\nsince sine is already a solution consider a particular solution of the form\nAt^2 sin t+Bt^2 cos t\n\nedit:I forgot you wanted variation of parameters\njust take\n$y(t) = C_1(t) cost + C_2(t) sint + C_3(t) tcost + C_4(t) tsint$\ncomplex numbers are optional, you just need to be able to solve\n(D2+1)y=0\nto deal with quadratic terms that are irreducible over reals\n\nLast edited: Nov 1, 2011\n3. Nov 1, 2011\n\n### VitaX\n\nAfter taking the particular solution to be:\n\n$y_p(t) = U_1 (t)cost + U_2 (t)sint + U_3 (t)tcost + U_4 (t)tsint$\n\nI then take the 4 derivatives and I ended up with the following 4 Equations (1st 3 are from the conditions that the U(t) derivatives add up to 0 while the last equation is derived from inputting the the derivatives into the original DE and cancelling out like terms):\n\n$U'_1 (t)cost + U'_2 (t)sint + U'_3 (t)tcost + U'_4 (t)tsint = 0$\n\n$-U'_1 (t)sint + U'_2 (t)cost + U'_3 (t)cost - U'_3 (t)tsint + U'_4 (t)sint + U'_4 (t)tcost = 0$\n\n$-U'_1 (t)cost - U'_2 (t)sint - 2U'_3 (t)sint - U'_3 (t)tscost + 2U'_4 (t)cost - U'_4 (t)tsint = 0$\n\n$U'_1 (t)sint - U'_2 (t)cost - 3U'_3 (t)cost + U'_3 (t)tsint - 3U'_4 (t)sint - U'_4 (t)tcost = sint$\n\nBut at this point, it is a complete monster. Can anyone possibly solve this mess?\n\n4. Nov 1, 2011\n\n### lurflurf\n\nIt is a bit messy, but the differential equations part it settled and only algebra remains. It also helps that only one right hand side is nonzero. It is also possible to solve\n(D2+1)y=f and then solve it again hence solving\n(D2+1)2y=f\n\n5. Nov 1, 2011\n\n### VitaX\n\nHmm, what exactly do you mean by those 2 equations?\n\n6. Nov 1, 2011\n\n### lurflurf\n\n(D2+1)y=f\ny''+y=f\n(D2+1)2y=f\ny''''+2y''+y=f\nthe second can be reduced to the first\nif\nu''+u=f\nand\ny''+y=u\nthen\ny''''+2y''+y=f\n\nor just do all that algebra","date":"2017-11-23 21:22:22","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.764826774597168, \"perplexity\": 974.2971123108846}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": false, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.3, \"absolute_threshold\": 20, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2017-47\/segments\/1510934806939.98\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20171123195711-20171123215711-00504.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Dave Mustaine criticizes who uses pre-recorded tracks during live concerts
The legendary Megadeth vocalist and guitarist Dave Mustaine criticized in an interview with Kerrang! radio (Transcribed by Blabbermouth), bands that use pre-recorded tracks during live concerts. The musician said that his group never did that and everything he sings is real. He also said that there was "one big band" that he said he couldn't remember which one it was, that was caught using those pre-recorded tracks recently. The musician was apparently talking about Kiss, that was caught using recorded tracks during their recent concert in Belgium.
Dave Mustaine criticizes who uses pre-recorded tracks during live concerts:
"I've always done the background singing on the records until — maybe about 10 years ago. (When) we started having another person come in and help supplement the vocals because it's just not my bag to be singing stuff that I'm not gonna sing live. I sing when I sing live on the records as much as I can."
"I don't think there's anything wrong with using supplements for songs and other sounds and stuff like that if you can't play 'em live. If you can play it live and you're being fucking lazy and you're seeing whatever just happened a couple of days ago with one of those big bands. The singer… the tape started and the drummer wasn't playing or something. You probably heard about that. I can't remember who it was."
"We don't have vocals that are canned. Usually what we have is a MIDI click track that runs all of our lights and switches all of our solos and stuff," Dave Mustaine said.
New Megadeth album
Megadeth recently released "We'll Be Back", the first single of their upcoming 16th studio album "The Sick, The Dying and The Dead" that will be out next September 2. According to Blabbermouth, the album will also have two covers: "Police Truck", 0riginally recorded by The Dead Kennedys and "This Planet's On Fire (Burn In Hell)," originally recorded by Sammy Hagar, who re-recorded the song with Megadeth for the album.
The album was recorded at Dave Mustaine's home in Nashville, Tennessee and was produced by Mustaine and Chris Rakestraw (Danzig, Parkway Drive), who had already produced the band's 2016 album "Dystopia". That record gave Megadeth their first Grammy Award.
Megadeth's current line up has: Dave Mustaine (Guitar and vocals), Kiko Loureiro (Guitar), Dirk Verbeuren (Drums) and James LoMenzo (Bass).
Related Topics:CLASSIC ROCK, dave mustaine, Featured, hard rock, heavy metal, interviews, megadeth, news, thrash metal
Eddie Trunk says David Lee Roth is holding up the Van Halen reunion
Journey releases new song "United We Stand" | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 4,698 |
Are you looking for opportunities to help others?
Aliquid atomorum hendrerit sea, altera offendit per te, nostrum explicari at mel. Mel summo inciderint ea. Odio suas probo ius at, at nullam graece putent vel. Ea evertitur maiestatis usu. Duo te vidit mundi accumsan. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 6,435 |
\section{Training on PointPillars}
\begin{table*}[h!]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{?c?c|c|c|c?}
\Xhline{0.8pt}
& \multicolumn{4}{c?}{\bf{Virtual KITTI}}\\
\hline
& \multicolumn{2}{c|}{3D mAP} & \multicolumn{2}{c?}{BEV mAP}\\
\hline
& 0.5 IoU & 0.7 IoU & 0.5 IoU & 0.7 IoU\\
\Xhline{0.8pt}
Single Beam Lidar & 20.94 & 09.51 & 25.95 & 14.73\\
\hline
\makecell{Single Beam Lidar\\(seperate model)} & 31.72 & 8.58 & 34.94 & 16.07\\
\hline
1 Light Curtain & 23.34 & 09.38 & 29.10 & 16.60\\
\hline
2 Light Curtains & 24.77 & 09.53 & 30.19 & 17.14\\
\hline
3 Light Curtains & 25.24 & 09.53 & 30.86 & 17.56\\
\Xhline{0.8pt}
\end{tabular}
\caption{Performance of detectors trained with single-beam LiDAR and up to three light curtains using PointPillars. Maybe training for longer might improve performance.}
\label{table:main-results-pp}
\end{table*}
\begin{table}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{?c?c|c|c|c?c|c|c|c?}
\Xhline{0.8pt}
& \multicolumn{4}{c?}{\bf{Virtual KITTI}}\\
\hline
& \multicolumn{2}{c|}{3D mAP} & \multicolumn{2}{c?}{BEV mAP}\\
\hline
& .5 IoU & .7 IoU & .5 IoU & .7 IoU\\
\Xhline{0.8pt}
Random & 30.07 & 12.02 & 33.98 & 17.78 \\
\hline
Fixed depth - 15m& 31.56 & 7.18 & 35.91 & 14.96 \\
\hline
Fixed depth - 30m& 30.45 & 10.97 & 33.79 & 18.86 \\
\hline
Fixed depth - 45m& 18.21 & 10.34 & 19.92 & 13.70 \\
\hline
\makecell{Greedy Optimization\\(Randomly break ties)}& 27.96 & 12.28 & 32.53 & 19.34\\
\hline
\makecell{Greedy Optimization\\(Min laser angle change)}& 17.24 & 10.10 & 20.61 & 14.51 \\
\hline
\makecell{Frontoparallel +\\Uncertainty} & 21.25 & 11.42 & 22.76 & 15.71 \\
\hline
\textbf{Ours} & 23.34 & 9.38 & 29.10 & 16.60 \\
\Xhline{0.8pt}
\end{tabular}
\caption{Baselines for alternate light curtain placement strategies, trained and tested on Virtual KITTI, using the PointPillars detector.}
\label{table:baselines-pp}
\end{table}
\sid{I should remove this section since the results are not good.}
\section{Hierarchical optimization objective for smoothness}
\label{app:hierarchical-opt}
Section~\ref{sec:dp} described an efficient algorithm for optimally placing light curtains to maximize coverage of high uncertainy regions. However, if two valid light curtain placements $\{\mathbf{X}'_t\}_{t=1}^T, \{\mathbf{X}''_t\}_{t=1}^T$ have equal sum of uncertainties, which one should we prefer? Distinct light curtain placements can have equal sums of uncertainties due to regions where the detector uncertainty is uniform. In such cases, we can choose to prefer curtains that are \textit{smooth}, i.e. the laser angle has to change the least on average. We define a hierarchical objective function that ranks two placements as follows:
\[ J_H(\{\mathbf{X}'_t\}_{t=1}^T) \geq J_H(\{\mathbf{X}''_t\}_{t=1}^T) \text{ iff }
\begin{cases}
J(\{\mathbf{X}'_t\}_{t=1}^T) > J(\{\mathbf{X}''_t\}_{t=1}^T)\\
\text{or}\\
\begin{cases}
J(\{\mathbf{X}'_t\}_{t=1}^T) = J(\{\mathbf{X}''_t\}_{t=1}^T)\\
\text{\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ and }\\
\sum_{t=1}^{T-1} |\theta(\mathbf{X}'_{t+1}) - \theta(\mathbf{X}'_{t})|^2 \\\leq \sum_{t=1}^{T-1} |\theta(\mathbf{X}''_{t+1}) - \theta(\mathbf{X}''_{t})|^2
\end{cases}
\end{cases}
\]
This hierarchical objective prefers light curtains that cover a higher sum of uncertainties. But if two curtains have the same sum, this objective prefers the one with a lower sum of squared laser angle deviations. We note that this hierarchical objective $J_H(\mathbf{X}_1, \dots, \mathbf{X}_T)$ also satisfies optimal substructure. In fact, it obeys the same recursive optimality equation as Equation~\ref{eq:bellman}. Hence, it can be accommodated by our approach with minimal modification to our algorithm. Additionally, it can be executed with no additional overhead in $O(NTB_\text{avg})$ time, and leads to smoother light curtains.
\section{Training active detection with online light curtain data generation}
\label{app:training-algo}
In this section, we expand on the details of our method to train the detector described in Section~\ref{sec:online-training}. Note that we use the same detector to process data from the single beam LiDAR and all subsequent light curtain placements.
During training, data instances need to be sampled from the single-beam LiDAR, as well as from up to $K$ number of light curtain placements. We choose $K=3$ in all our experiments. Crucially, since the light curtains are placed based on the output (uncertainty maps) of the detector, the point cloud data distribution from the $k$-th ($1 \leq k \leq K$) light curtain placement depends on the current weights of the detector. As the weights of the detector get updated during each gradient descent step, the input training data distribution from the $k$-th light curtain also changes. To accomodate for non-stationary training data, we propose \textit{training with online data-generation}. This is described in Algorithm~\ref{alg:training}.
\begin{algorithm}
\caption{Training with Online Light Curtain Data Generation}
\DontPrintSemicolon
$W_0 \gets$ initial weights of the detector\;
$T \gets$ number of training iterations\;
$K \gets$ number of light curtain placements\;
\SetKwFunction{FMain}{InputPointCloud}
\SetKwProg{Fn}{Function}{:}{}
\Fn{\FMain{$W$, $S$, $k$}}{
\eIf{$k = 0$} {
$P_0 \gets$ point cloud from single-beam LiDAR in scene S\;
\KwRet $P_0$\;
}{
$P_{k-1} \gets$ \texttt{InputPointCloud($W$, $S$, $k-1$)}\;
$H \gets$ uncertainty map from detector with weights $W$ and input $P_{k-1}$\;
$P \gets$ point cloud from placing light curtain optimized for $H$ in scene $S$\;
$P_k \gets P_{k-1} \cup P$\;
\KwRet $P_k$\;
}
}
\For{t = 1 \text{to} T}{
$S_t \gets$ $t$-th training scene\;
$k_t \gets$ randomly sample from $\{0, 1, \dots, K\}$\;
$P_t \gets$ \texttt{InputPointCloud}($W_{t-1}$, $S_t$, $k_t$)\;
$W_t \gets$ gradient descent update using previous weights $W_{t-1}$ and input $P_t$\;
}
\KwRet $W_T$
\label{alg:training}
\end{algorithm}
At each training iteration $t$, we retrieve a scene $S_t$ from the training dataset. To create the input point cloud, we choose to either use the single-beam LiDAR data or $k$ light curtain placements ($1 \leq k \leq K$), each of them with equal probability. For generating the $k$-th light curtain data, we start with the single-beam LiDAR point cloud. Then we successively perform a forward pass through the detector network with the current weights to obtain an uncertainty map. We compute the optimal light curtain placement for this map, gather points returned from placing this curtain, and finally, fuse the points back into the input point cloud. This cycle is repeated $k$ times to obtain the input point cloud to train on. Generating light curtain data in such an \emph{online} fashion ensures that the input distribution doesn't diverge from the network weights during the course of training.
\subsection*{Ablation experiment}
Here, we perform an ablation experiment on the Virtual KITTI dataset, to evaluate the importance of training with online light curtain data generation. We first collect the entire dataset at the beginning, using the initial weights of the network. Then, we freeze this data and train the detector. The results are shown in Table~\ref{table:ablation}. We see that the accuracy on light curtain data (Table~\ref{table:ablation} rows 2-4) decreases substantially to less 2\%, since this data distribution diverges during training. However, the performance on single-beam LiDAR remains relatively same, since the LiDAR data distribution doesn't change. This demonstrates the importance of re-generating the training data online as the weights of the detector change.
\begin{table*}[h!]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{?c?c|c|c|c?}
\Xhline{0.8pt}
& \multicolumn{4}{c?}{\bf{Virtual KITTI}}\\
\hline
& \multicolumn{2}{c|}{3D mAP} & \multicolumn{2}{c?}{BEV mAP}\\
\hline
& 0.5 IoU & 0.7 IoU & 0.5 IoU & 0.7 IoU\\
\Xhline{0.8pt}
Single Beam Lidar & \bf{37.68} & \bf{18.65} & \bf{38.14} & \bf{30.08}\\
\hline
1 Light Curtain & 1.41 & 0.48 & 1.61 & 0.75\\
\hline
2 Light Curtains & 0.73 & 0.38 & 1.22 & 0.58\\
\hline
3 Light Curtains & 0.68 & 0.36 & 1.13 & 0.54
\\
\Xhline{0.8pt}
\end{tabular}
\caption{Performance of the detector trained with single-beam LiDAR and up to three light curtains, without online training data generation. The training dataset is collected using the initial weights of the network and is fixed during the remainder of training. The light curtain performance decreases substantially.}
\label{table:ablation}
\end{table*}
\section{Efficiency analysis}
In this section, we report the time taken by our method, for varying number of light curtain placements, and for different light curtain placement algorithms, in Table~\ref{table:timing}. The time (in seconds) includes the time taken for all preceding steps. For example, the time for 2 light curtain placements includes the time required for generating the single-beam LiDAR data, computing the optimal first and second light curtain placements, and all intermediate forwarded passes through the detection network while generating uncertainty maps. The time is averaged over 100 independent trials over different scenes, and we report the 95\% confidence intervals.
\begin{table}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{?c?c|c|c|c?}
\Xhline{0.8pt}
& \makecell{Single-beam\\LiDAR} & \makecell{One\\ light curtain} & \makecell{Two\\ light curtain} & \makecell{Three\\ light curtain}\\
\Xhline{0.8pt}
Random & 0.096 $\pm$ 0.001 & 0.763 $\pm$ 0.008 & 1.441 $\pm$ 0.014 & 2.133 $\pm$ 0.014 \\
\hline
Fixed depth - 15m & 0.090 $\pm$ 0.002 & 0.765 $\pm$ 0.008 & 1.412 $\pm$ 0.012 & 2.028 $\pm$ 0.018 \\
\hline
Fixed depth - 30m & 0.095 $\pm$ 0.002 & 0.789 $\pm$ 0.005 & 1.474 $\pm$ 0.008 & 2.180 $\pm$ 0.013 \\
\hline
Fixed depth - 45m & 0.094 $\pm$ 0.001 & 0.778 $\pm$ 0.003 & 1.475 $\pm$ 0.013 & 2.174 $\pm$ 0.012 \\
\hline
\makecell{Greedy Optimization\\(Randomly break ties)} & 0.092 $\pm$ 0.000 & 0.825 $\pm$ 0.014 & 1.547 $\pm$ 0.023 & 2.250 $\pm$ 0.030 \\
\hline
\makecell{Greedy Optimization\\(Min laser angle change)} & 0.086 $\pm$ 0.001 & 0.824 $\pm$ 0.010 & 1.543 $\pm$ 0.020 & 2.242 $\pm$ 0.028 \\
\hline
\makecell{Frontoparallel +\\Uncertainty} & 0.091 $\pm$ 0.001 & 0.441 $\pm$ 0.003 & 0.807 $\pm$ 0.006 & 1.165 $\pm$ 0.008 \\
\hline
Dynamic Programming & 0.097 $\pm$ 0.008 & 0.944 $\pm$ 0.010 & 1.767 $\pm$ 0.015 & 2.600 $\pm$ 0.020 \\
\Xhline{0.8pt}
\end{tabular}
\caption{Time efficiency (in seconds) for varying number of light curtains and different light curtain placement algorithms. Time is averaged over 100 independent trials over different scenes, and we report the 95\% confidence intervals.}
\label{table:timing}
\end{table}
Note that as we place more light curtains, more time is consumed for the network's forward pass and in calculating where to place the light curtain. This presents a speed-accuracy tradeoff; more light curtains will improve detection accuracy at the expense of taking more time. On the other hand, our method can run faster using fewer light curtains but with a decreased accuracy. This tradeoff is visualized in Figure~\ref{fig:tradeoff}.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[trim=11 11 22 11,clip,width=0.5\textwidth]{figures/supplement/tradeoff.png}
\caption{Speed-accuracy tradeoff using light curtains optimized by dynamic programming, on the Virtual KITTI dataset. More light curtains correpsond to increased accuracy but reduced speed.}
\label{fig:tradeoff}
\end{figure}
\section{Source code}
For reproducibilty purposes, we are releaing our source code as part of the supplementary material. The source code can be found in the folder named `\texttt{code}'. The code is organized such that all experiments and results in this paper can be reproduced. Specifically, training runs for all models used in this paper can be launched using the `\texttt{launch\_all\_exp.py}' script. In addition, scripts to compile the quantitative results and create visualizations can be found in the `\texttt{vis/}' folder.
\section{Noise simulations}
\label{app:noise}
In order to simulate noise in the real-world sensor, we add 10\% noise to the light curtain input, for varying number of light curtain placements, on the Virtual KITTI dataset. The results are shown in Table~\ref{table:noise}. The results are comparable to without noise, indicating that our method is robust to noise and is likely to transfer well to real-world data.
\begin{table*}[h!]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{?c?c|c|c|c?c|c|c|c?}
\Xhline{0.8pt}
& \multicolumn{8}{c?}{\bf{Virtual KITTI}}\\
\hline
& \multicolumn{4}{c?}{\bf{Without noise}} & \multicolumn{4}{c?}{\bf{With noise}}\\
\hline
& \multicolumn{2}{c|}{3D mAP} & \multicolumn{2}{c?}{BEV mAP} & \multicolumn{2}{c|}{3D mAP} & \multicolumn{2}{c?}{BEV mAP}\\
\hline
& 0.5 IoU & 0.7 IoU & 0.5 IoU & 0.7 IoU & 0.5 IoU & 0.7 IoU & 0.5 IoU & 0.7 IoU\\
\Xhline{0.8pt}
Single Beam Lidar & 39.91 & 15.49 & 40.77 & 36.54 & 39.03 & 17.13 & 39.93 & 30.26\\
\hline
1 Light Curtain & 58.01 & 35.29 & 58.51 & 47.05 & 57.04 & 25.99 & 57.65 & 45.31\\
\hline
2 Light Curtains & 60.86 & 37.91 & 61.10 & 49.84 & 59.43 & 30.91 & 59.89 & 46.11\\
\hline
3 Light Curtains & \bf{68.52} & \bf{38.47} & \bf{68.82} & \bf{50.53} & \bf{60.02} & \bf{31.09} & \bf{66.78} & \bf{46.39}
\\
\Xhline{0.8pt}
\end{tabular}
\caption{Performance of detectors trained with single-beam LiDAR and up to three light curtains, with $10\%$ additional noise in the light curtain input. Performance is not significantly lower than without noise.}
\label{table:noise}
\end{table*}
\section{Information gain objective}
\label{app:info-gain}
In this section, we derive the optimization objective used in Sections~\ref{sec:objective} and~\ref{sec:dp}, from a perspective of maximizing information gain. Information gain is a well-defined mathematical quantity, and choosing \addition{sensing} actions to maximize information gain has been used as the basis of many works on next-best view planning (see Sec.~\ref{sec:background}).
We will first describe some notation, and make two simplifying assumptions in order to derive our objective as an approximation of information gain.
\subsection{Notation}
\begin{itemize}
\item[\textbullet] The detector predicts the probability of a detection at every anchor box location. Let there be a total of $K$ discrete anchor box location, which are usually organized as a regular 2D-grid (see Sec.~\ref{sec:uncertainty-extraction}). Let $\mathbf{A}_k$ denote the $k$-th anchor box, where $1 \leq k \leq K$. Define $\mathbf{A}=\{\mathbf{A}_k\}_{k=1}^K$ to be the vector of all anchor boxes.
\item[\textbullet] Let $D_{\mathbf{A}_k}$ be a binary random variable denoting whether a detection exists at $\mathbf{A}_k$. $D_{\mathbf{A}_k} \in \{0, 1\}$; it is $0$ if there is no detection at $\mathbf{A}_k$, and $1$ if there is. Define $D_\mathbf{A}=\{D_{\mathbf{A}_k}\}_{k=1}^K$.
\item[\textbullet] Given a unified point cloud $C$, an inference algorithm (in this case, the detector) outputs a probability distribution $P(D_\mathbf{A}\ |\ C)$ over all possible detection states $D_\mathbf{A} \in \{0, 1\}^K$. Denote by $P(D_{\mathbf{A}_k})$ the marginal probability distribution of detection at $\mathbf{A}_k$.
\item[\textbullet] As discussed in Sec.~\ref{sec:background}, a single light curtain placement is defined by a set of control points $L=\{\mathbf{X}_t\}_{t=1}^T$. The light curtain will be placed to lie vertically on top of these control points. The 3D points sensed by this light curtain are fused back into $C$, to obtain an updated unified point cloud $C'$. We assume for now that the control points $\mathbf{X}_t$ correspond to some anchor box locations.
\end{itemize}
\subsection{Assumptions}
We now make the following assumptions:
\begin{enumerate}
\item \textit{Detections probabilities across locations are independent}.\\
That is, $P(D_\mathbf{A}\ |\ C) = \prod_{k=1}^K P(D_{\mathbf{A}_k}\ |\ C)$. This is a reasonable assumption, since the probability of detections at one location should be unaffected by detections in other locations. A consequence of this assumption is that the overall entropy $H(D_\mathbf{A}\ |\ C)$ can be written as the sum of entropies over individual anchor locations i.e. $H(D_\mathbf{A}\ |\ C) = \sum_{k=1}^K H(D_{\mathbf{A}_k}\ |\ C)$ (since the entropy of independent random variables is the sum of their individual entropies).
\item \textit{Light curtain sensing resolves uncertainty fully but locally}.\\
After placing $L = \{\mathbf{X}_t\}_{t=1}^T$, updating the unified point cloud to $C'$, re-running the detector, and obtaining a new probability distribution of the updated detections $D'_\mathbf{A}$, the following hold.
\begin{enumerate}
\item The uncertainty of locations covered by the curtain reduces to zero:\\
$P(D'_{\mathbf{A}_k}\ |\ C') \in \{0, 1\}$ for all $\mathbf{A}_k \in L$.
\item The uncertainty of all the other locations remains unchanged:\\
$P(D'_{\mathbf{A}_k}\ |\ C') = P(D_{\mathbf{A}_k}\ |\ C)$ for all $\mathbf{A}_k \not\in L$.
\end{enumerate}
\end{enumerate}
Assumptions 1 and 2 imply that the entropy of the updated distribution is given by (here $K$ is the total number of anchor locations, and $T$ is the number of locations that the light curtain lies on).
\begin{align*}
H(D'_\mathbf{A}\ |\ C') &= \sum_{k=1}^K H(D'_{\mathbf{A}_k}\ |\ C')\\
&= \sum_{\mathbf{A}_k \in L} \underbrace{H(D'_{\mathbf{A}_k}\ |\ C')}_{=\ 0 \text{ as } P(D'_{\mathbf{A}_k}|C') \in \{0, 1\}} + \sum_{\mathbf{A}_k \not\in L} \underbrace{H(D'_{\mathbf{A}_k}\ |\ C')}_{=\ H(D_{\mathbf{A}_k}\ |\ C)}\\
&= \sum_{\mathbf{A}_k} H(D_{\mathbf{A}_k}\ |\ C) - \sum_{\mathbf{A}_k \in L} H(D_{\mathbf{A}_k}\ |\ C)\\
&= \sum_{k=1}^K H(D_{\mathbf{A}_k}\ |\ C) - \sum_{\mathbf{A}_k \in L} H(D_{\mathbf{A}_k}\ |\ C)\\
&=H(D_\mathbf{A}\ |\ C) - \sum_{t=1}^T H(D_{\mathbf{X}_t}\ |\ C)
\end{align*}
The information gain, which is essentially a difference between the prior and updated entropies, is
\begin{align*}
\text{Information Gain} &= H(D_{\mathbf{A}}\ |\ C) - H(D'_{\mathbf{A}}\ |\ C')\\
&= H(D_{\mathbf{A}}\ |\ C) - \Big( H(D_{\mathbf{A}}\ |\ C) - \sum_{t=1}^T H(D_{\mathbf{X}_t}\ |\ C) \Big)\\
&= \sum_{t=1}^T H(D_{\mathbf{X}_t}\ |\ C)
\end{align*}
\textbf{Optimization objective}: This leads us to an optimization objective where maximizing information gain is equivalent to simply maximizing the sum of uncertainties (binary entropies) over the control points the curtain lies on.
The maximization objective then becomes: $J(\mathbf{X}_1, \dots, \mathbf{X}_T) = \sum_{t=1}^T H(\mathbf{X}_t)$, where $H(\mathbf{X})$ is the binary entropy of the detector's confidence at the location of $\mathbf{X}$.
\section*{Acknowledgements}
We thank Matthew O'Toole for feedback on the initial draft of this paper. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. IIS-1849154, IIS-1900821 and by the United States Air Force and DARPA under Contract No. FA8750-18-C-0092.
\bibliographystyle{splncs04}
\section{Related Work}
\label{sec:related-work}
\subsection{Active Perception}
Active Perception encompasses a variety of problems and techniques that involve actively controlling the sensor for improved perception~\cite{bajcsy1988active,wilkes1994active}. Examples include actively modifying camera parameters~\cite{bajcsy1988active}, moving a camera to look around occluding objects~\cite{cheng2018reinforcement}, and obtaining the next-best-view~\cite{connolly1985determination}. Prior works have used active perception for static scenes~\cite{mnih2014recurrent,ba2014multiple} via a series of controllable partial glimpses.
Our paper differs from past work because we use a controllable depth sensor (light curtains) and combine it with deep learning uncertainty estimates in a novel active perception algorithm.
\subsection{Object Detection from Point Clouds}
There have been many recent advances in deep learning for 3D object detection. Approaches include representing LiDAR data as range images in LaserNet\cite{meyer2019lasernet}, using raw point clouds~\cite{shi2019pointrcnn}, and using point clouds in the bird's eye view such as AVOD~\cite{ku2018joint}, HDNet~\cite{yang2018hdnet} and Complex-YOLO~\cite{simony2018complex}. Most state-of-the-art approaches use voxelized point clouds, such as VoxelNet~\cite{zhou2018voxelnet}, PointPillars~\cite{lang2019pointpillars}, SECOND~\cite{yan2018second}, and CBGS~\cite{zhu2019class}. These methods process an input point cloud by dividing the space into 3D regions (voxels or pillars) and extracting features from each of region using a PointNet~\cite{qi2017pointnet} based architecture. Then, the volumetric feature map is converted to 2D features via convolutions, followed by a detection head that produces bounding boxes.
We demonstrate that we can use such detectors, along with our novel light curtain placement algorithm, to process data from a single beam LiDAR combined with light curtains.
\subsection{Next-Best View Planning}
\label{sec:related-work-nbv}
Next-best view (NBV) planning refers to a broad set of problems in which the objective is to select the next best sensing action in order to solve a specific task. Typical problems include object instance classification~\cite{Wu_2015_CVPR,doumanoglou2016recovering,denzler2002information,scott2003view} and 3D reconstruction~\cite{isler2016information,kriegel2015efficient,vasquez2014volumetric,daudelin2017adaptable,haner2012covariance}. Many works on next-best view formulate the objective as maximizing information gain (also known as mutual information)~\cite{Wu_2015_CVPR,denzler2002information,isler2016information,kriegel2015efficient,vasquez2014volumetric,daudelin2017adaptable}, using models such as probabilistic occupancy grids for beliefs over states~\cite{Wu_2015_CVPR,isler2016information,kriegel2015efficient,vasquez2014volumetric,daudelin2017adaptable}.
Our method is similar in spirit to next-best view. One could consider each light curtain placement as obtaining a new view of the environment; we try to find the next best light curtain that aids object detection. In Sec.~\ref{sec:objective} and Appendix~\ref{app:info-gain}, we derive an information-gain based objective to find the next best light curtain placement.
\section{Approach}
\subsection{Overview}
Our aim is to use light curtains for detecting objects in a 3D scene. The overall approach is illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:pipeline}. We use a voxel-based point cloud detector~\cite{yan2018second} and train it to use light curtain data without any architectural changes. The pipeline illustrated in Fig.~\ref{fig:pipeline} proceeds as follows.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{figures/pipeline2.png}
\caption{\textit{Our method for detecting objects using light curtains.} An inexpensive single-beam lidar input is used by a 3D detection network to obtain rough initial estimates of object locations. The uncertainty of the detector is used to optimally place a light curtain that covers the most uncertain regions. The points detected by the light curtain (shown in green in the bottom figure) are input back into the detector so that it can update its predictions as well as uncertainty. The new uncertainty maps can again be used to place successive light curtains in an iterative manner, closing the loop.}
\label{fig:pipeline}
\vspace{-10pt}
\end{figure}
To obtain an initial set of object detections, we use data from an inexpensive single-beam LiDAR as input to the detector. This produces rough estimates of object locations in the scene. Single-beam LiDAR is inexpensive because it consists of only one laser beam as opposed to 64 or 128 beams that are common in autonomous driving. The downside is that the data from the single beam contains very few points; this results in inaccurate detections and high uncertainty about object locations in the scene (see Fig.~\ref{fig:pull}b).
Alongside bounding box detections, we can also extract from the detector an ``uncertainty map" (explained in Sec.~\ref{sec:uncertainty-extraction}). We then use light curtains, placed in regions guided by the detector's uncertainty, to collect more data and iteratively refine the object detections. In order to get more data from the regions the detector is most uncertain about, we derive an information-gain based objective function that sums the uncertainties along the light curtain control points (Sec.~\ref{sec:objective} and Appendix~\ref{app:info-gain}),
and we develop a constrained optimization algorithm that places the light curtain to maximize this objective (Sec.~\ref{sec:dp}).
Once the light curtain is placed, it returns a dense set of points where the curtain intersects with visible objects in the scene. We maintain a \textit{unified point cloud}, which we define as the union of all points observed so far. The unified point cloud is initialized with the points from the single-beam LiDAR. Points from the light curtain are added to the unified point cloud and this data is input back into the detector. Note that the input representation for the detector remains the same (point clouds), enabling the use of existing state-of-the-art point cloud detection methods without any architectural modifications.
As new data from the light curtains are added to the unified point cloud and input to the detector, the detector refines its predictions and improves its accuracy. Furthermore, the additional inputs cause the network to update its uncertainty map; the network may no longer be uncertain about the areas that were sensed by the light curtain. Our algorithm uses the new uncertainty map to generate a new light curtain placement. We can iteratively place light curtains to cover the current uncertain regions and input the sensed points back into the network, closing the loop and iteratively improving detection performance.
\subsection{Extracting uncertainty from the detector}
\label{sec:uncertainty-extraction}
The standard pipeline for 3D object detection~\cite{zhou2018voxelnet,yan2018second,lang2019pointpillars} proceeds as follows. First, the ground plane (parallel to the $xz$-plane)
is uniformly tiled with ``anchor boxes"; these are reference boxes used by a 3D detector to produce detections. They are located on points in a uniformly discretized grid $G = [x_\text{min}, x_\text{max}]\times[z_\text{min}, z_\text{max}]$. For example, a $[-40\text{m}, 40\text{m}] \times [0\text{m}, 70.4\text{m}]$ grid is used for detecting cars in KITTI~\cite{geiger2013vision}. A 3D detector, which is usually a binary detector, takes a point cloud as input, and produces a binary classification score $p \in [0, 1]$ and bounding box regression offsets for every anchor box. The score $p$ is the estimated probability that the anchor box contains an object of a specific class (such as car/pedestrian). The detector produces a detection for that anchor box if $p$ exceeds a certain threshold. If so, the detector combines the fixed dimensions of the anchor box with its predicted regression offsets to output a detection box.
We can convert the confidence score to binary entropy $H(p) \in [0, 1]$ where $H(p) = -p\log_2 p - (1-p)\log_2(1-p)$. Entropy is a measure of the detector's uncertainty about the presence of an object at the anchor location. Since we have an uncertainty score at uniformly spaced anchor locations parallel to the $xz$-plane, they form an ``uncertainty map'' in the top-down view. We use this uncertainty map to place light curtains.
\subsection{Information gain objective}
\label{sec:objective}
\newcommand{\mathbf{A}}{\mathbf{A}}
Based on the uncertainty estimates given by Sec.~\ref{sec:uncertainty-extraction}, our method determines how to place the light curtain to sense the most uncertain/ambiguous regions.
It seems intuitive that sensing the locations of highest detector uncertainty can provide the largest amount of information from a single light curtain placement, towards improving detector accuracy.
As discussed in Sec.~\ref{sec:background}, a single light curtain placement is defined by a set of $T$ control points $\{\mathbf{X}_t\}_{t=1}^T$. The light curtain will be placed to lie vertically on top of these control points.
To define an optimization objective, we use the framework of information gain (commonly used in next-best view methods; see Sec.~\ref{sec:related-work-nbv}) along with some simplifying assumptions (see Appendix~\ref{app:info-gain}). We show that under these assumptions, placing a light curtain to maximize information gain (a mathematically defined information-theoretic quantity) is equivalent to maximizing the objective $J(\mathbf{X}_1, \dots, \mathbf{X}_T) = \sum_{t=1}^T H(\mathbf{X}_t)$, where $H(\mathbf{X})$ is the binary entropy of the detector's confidence at the anchor location of $\mathbf{X}$. When the control point $\mathbf{X}$ does not exactly correspond to an anchor location, we impute $H(\mathbf{X})$ by nearest-neighbor interpolation from the uncertainty map. Please see Appendix~\ref{app:info-gain} for a detailed derivation.
\subsection{Optimal light curtain placement}
\label{sec:dp}
In this section, we will describe an exact optimization algorithm to maximize the objective function $J(\mathbf{X}_1, \dots, \mathbf{X}_T) = \sum_{t=1}^T H(\mathbf{X}_t)$.\\
\textbf{Constrained optimization}: The control points $\{\mathbf{X}_t\}_{t=1}^T$, where each $\mathbf{X}_t$ lies on the the camera ray $\mathbf{R}_t$, must be chosen to satisfy the physical constraints of the light curtain device: $|\theta(\mathbf{X}_{t+1}) - \theta(\mathbf{X}_t)| \leq \Delta \theta_\text{max}$ (see Sec.~\ref{sec:background}: light curtain constraints). Hence, this is a constrained optimization problem. We discretize the problem by considering a dense set of $N$ discrete, equally spaced points $\mathcal{D}_t = \{\mathbf{X}_t^{(n)}\}_{n=1}^N$ on each ray $\mathbf{R}_t$. We will assume that $\mathbf{X}_t \in \mathcal{D}_t$ for all $1 \leq t \leq T$ henceforth unless stated otherwise. We use $N=80$ in all our experiments which we found to be sufficiently large. Overall, the optimization problem can be formulated as:
\begin{align}
&\arg \max_{\{\mathbf{X}_t\}_{t=1}^T} \sum_{t=1}^T H(\mathbf{X}_t)\\
&\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \text{where}\ \mathbf{X}_t \in \mathcal{D}_t\ \forall 1 \leq t \leq T\\
&\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \text{subject to}\ |\theta(\mathbf{X}_{t+1}) - \theta(\mathbf{X}_t)| \leq \Delta \theta_\text{max},\ \forall 1 \leq t < T
\label{eq:constraint}
\end{align}
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\subfloat[]{
\includegraphics[trim=0 3 1 3,clip,width=0.45\textwidth]{figures/dp/graph_final.png}
}
\subfloat[]{
\includegraphics[trim=11 9 15 0,clip,width=0.47\textwidth]{figures/dp/heatmap_final.png}
}
\caption{(a) Light curtain constraint graph. Black dots are nodes and blue arrows are the edges of the graph. The optimized light curtain profile is depicted as red arrows. (b) Example uncertainty map from the detector and optimized light curtain profile in red. Black is lowest uncertainty and white is highest uncertainty. The optimized light curtain covers the most uncertain regions.}
\label{fig:dp}
\vspace{-10pt}
\end{figure}
\noindent \textbf{Light Curtain Constraint Graph:} we encode the light curtain constraints into a graph, as illustrated in Figure~\ref{fig:dp}.
Each black ray corresponds to a camera ray. Each black dot on the ray is a vertex in the constraint graph. It represents a candidate control point and is associated with an uncertainty score. Exactly one control point must be chosen per camera ray. The optimization objective is to choose such points to maximize the total sum of uncertainties. An edge between two control points indicates that the light curtain is able to transition from one control point $\mathbf{X}_t$ to the next, $\mathbf{X}_{t+1}$ without violating the maximum velocity light curtain constraints.
Thus, the maximum velocity constraint (Eqn.~\ref{eq:constraint}) can be specified by restricting the set of edges (depicted using blue arrows). We note that the graph only needs to be constructed once and can be done offline.\\
\textbf{Dynamic programming for constrained optimization:} The number of possible light curtain placements, $|\mathcal{D}_1 \times \dots \times \mathcal{D}_T| = N^T$, is exponentially large, which prevents us from searching for the optimal solution by brute force. However, we observe that the problem can be decomposed into simpler subproblems. In particular, let us define $J^*_t(\mathbf{X}_t)$ as the optimal sum of uncertainties of the \textit{tail subproblem} starting from $\mathbf{X}_t$ i.e.
\begin{align}
J_t^*(\mathbf{X}_t) = &\max_{\mathbf{X}_{t+1}, \dots, \mathbf{X}_T} H(\mathbf{X}_t) + \sum_{k=t+1}^T H(\mathbf{X}_k); \\
&\text{subject to}\ |\theta(\mathbf{X}_{k+1}) - \theta(\mathbf{X}_k)| \leq \Delta \theta_\text{max},\ \forall\ t \leq k < T
\end{align}
If we were able to compute $J^*_t(\mathbf{X}_t)$, then this would help in solving a more complex subproblem using recursion:
we observe that $J^*_t(\mathbf{X}_t)$ has the property of \emph{optimal substructure,} i.e. the optimal solution of $J_{t-1}^*(\mathbf{X}_{t-1})$ can be computed from the optimal solution of $J_t^*(\mathbf{X}_t)$ via
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
J_{t-1}^*(\mathbf{X}_{t-1}) = H(\mathbf{X}_{t-1}) + &\max_{\mathbf{X}_t \in \mathcal{D}_t} J_t^*(\mathbf{X}_{t})\\
&\text{subject to}\ |\theta(\mathbf{X}_t) - \theta(\mathbf{X}_{t-1})| \leq \Delta \theta_\text{max}
\label{eq:bellman}
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
Because of this optimal substructure property, we can solve for $J_{t-1}^*(\mathbf{X}_{t-1})$ via dynamic programming. We also note that the solution to $\max_{\mathbf{X}_1} J_1^*(\mathbf{X}_1)$ is the solution to our original constrained optimization problem (Eqn. 1-3).
We thus perform the dynamic programming optimization as follows:
the recursion from Eqn.~\ref{eq:bellman} can be implemented by first performing a backwards pass, starting from $T$ and computing $J_t^*(\mathbf{X}_t)$ for each $\mathbf{X}_t$. Computing each $J_t^*(\mathbf{X}_t)$ takes only $O(B_\text{avg})$ time where $B_\text{avg}$ is the average degree of a vertex (number of edges starting from a vertex) in the constraint graph, since we iterate once over all edges of $\mathbf{X}_t$ in Eqn.~\ref{eq:bellman}. Then, we do a forward pass, starting with $\arg \max_{\mathbf{X}_1 \in \mathcal{D}_1} J_1^*(\mathbf{X}_1)$ and for a given $\mathbf{X}^*_{t-1}$, choosing $\mathbf{X}^*_t$ according to Eqn.~\ref{eq:bellman}. Since there are $N$ vertices per ray and $T$ rays in the graph, the overall algorithm takes $O(NTB_\text{avg})$ time; this is a significant reduction from the $O(N^T)$ brute-force solution.\\
\textbf{Hierarchical optimization objective for smoothness:} If two light curtain placements produce the same sum of uncertainties, which one should we prefer? We propose a hierarchical optimization objective that prefers smoother light curtains. We show that this also has the optimal substructure property and can be optimized in a very similar manner (see Appendix~\ref{app:hierarchical-opt} for details).
\subsection{Training active detector with online training data generation}
\label{sec:online-training}
We now describe our approach to train 3D point cloud detectors with data from light curtains and single-beam lidar. At each training iteration $t$, we retrieve a scene $S_t$ from the training dataset. To create the input point cloud, we choose to either use the single-beam LiDAR data or $k$ light curtain placements ($1 \leq k \leq K$), each of them with equal probability. For generating the $k$-th light curtain data, we start with the single-beam LiDAR point cloud. Then we successively perform a forward pass through the detector network with the current weights to obtain an uncertainty map. We compute the optimal light curtain placement for this map, gather points returned from placing this curtain, and finally, fuse the points back into the input point cloud. This cycle is repeated $k$ times to obtain the input point cloud to train on. Generating light curtain data in such an \emph{online} fashion ensures that the input distribution doesn't diverge from the network weights during the course of training. See Appendix~\ref{app:training-algo} for more algorithmic details and an ablation experiment that evaluates the importance of online training data generation.
\section{Experiments}
\label{sec:experiments}
\textbf{Datasets:}
To evaluate our algorithm, we need dense ground truth depth maps to simulate an arbitrary placement of a light curtain. However, standard autonomous driving datasets, such as KITTI~\cite{geiger2013vision} and nuScenes~\cite{caesar2019nuscenes}, contain only sparse LiDAR data, and hence the data is not suitable to accurately simulate a dense light curtain to evaluate our method. To circumvent this problem, we demonstrate our method on two synthetic datasets that provide dense ground truth depth maps, namely the Virtual KITTI~\cite{vkitti} and SYNTHIA~\cite{synthia} datasets.
Virtual KITTI is a photo-realistic synthetic video dataset designed for video understanding tasks~\cite{vkitti}. It contains 21,160 frames (10,630 unique depth maps) generated from five different virtual worlds in urban driving settings design to closely resemble five scenes in the KITTI dataset, under different camera poses and weather conditions. It provides ground truth depth maps and 3D bounding boxes. We use four scenes (ids: 0001, 0006, 0018, 0020) as our training set, and one scene (id: 0002) as our test set.
We also use the latest version of the SYNTHIA dataset~\cite{synthia} designed for active learning purposes. It is a large dataset containing photo-realistic scenes from urban driving scenarios, and provides ground truth depth and 3D bounding box annotations. It contains 191 training scenes ({\raise.17ex\hbox{$\scriptstyle\sim$}} 96K frames) and 97 test scenes ({\raise.17ex\hbox{$\scriptstyle\sim$}} 45K frames).
\textbf{Evaluation metrics:}
We evaluate using common 3D detection metrics: mean average precision (mAP) of 3D bounding boxes (denoted as 3D mAP) and of 2D boxes in the bird's eye view (denoted as BEV mAP). We also evaluate using two different IoU overlap thresholds of 0.5 and 0.7 between detection boxes and ground-truth boxes to be considered true positives.
Our experiments demonstrate the following:
First, we show that our method for successive placement of light curtains improves detection performance; particularly, there is a significant increase between the performance of single-beam LiDAR and the performance after placing the first light curtain. We also compare our method to multiple ablations and alternative placement strategies that demonstrate that each component of our method is crucial to achieve good performance. Finally, we show that our method can generalize to many more light curtain placements at test time than the method was trained on.
\addition{In the appendix, we perform further experiments that include evaluating the generalization of our method to noise in the light curtain data, an ablation experiment for training with online data generation (Sec.~\ref{sec:online-training}), and efficiency analysis.}
\subsection{Comparison with varying number of light curtains}
We train our method using online training data generation simultaneously on data from single-beam LiDAR and one, two, and three light curtain placements. We perform this experiment for both the Virtual KITTI and SYNTHIA datasets. The accuracies on their tests sets are reported in Table~\ref{table:main-results}.
\begin{table*}[h!]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{?c?c|c|c|c?c|c|c|c?}
\Xhline{0.8pt}
& \multicolumn{4}{c?}{\bf{Virtual KITTI}} & \multicolumn{4}{c?}{\bf{SYNTHIA}}\\
\hline
& \multicolumn{2}{c|}{3D mAP} & \multicolumn{2}{c?}{BEV mAP} & \multicolumn{2}{c|}{3D mAP} & \multicolumn{2}{c?}{BEV mAP}\\
\hline
& 0.5 IoU & 0.7 IoU & 0.5 IoU & 0.7 IoU & 0.5 IoU & 0.7 IoU & 0.5 IoU & 0.7 IoU\\
\Xhline{0.8pt}
Single Beam Lidar & 39.91 & 15.49 & 40.77 & 36.54 & 60.49 & 47.73 & 60.69 & 51.22\\
\hline
\makecell{Single Beam Lidar\\(separate model)} & 42.35 & 23.66 & 47.77 & 40.15 & 60.69 & 48.23 & 60.84 & 57.98\\
\hline
1 Light Curtain & 58.01 & 35.29 & 58.51 & 47.05 & 68.79 & 55.99 & 68.97 & 59.63\\
\hline
2 Light Curtains & 60.86 & 37.91 & 61.10 & 49.84 & 69.02 & 57.08 & 69.17 & 67.14\\
\hline
3 Light Curtains & \bf{68.52} & \bf{38.47} & \bf{68.82} & \bf{50.53} & \bf{69.16} & \bf{57.30} & \bf{69.25} & \bf{67.25}\\
\Xhline{0.8pt}
\end{tabular}
\caption{Performance of the detector trained with single-beam LiDAR and up to three light curtains. Performance improves with more light curtain placements, with a significant jump at the first light curtain placement.}
\label{table:main-results}
\vspace{-15pt}
\end{table*}
Note that there is a significant and consistent increase in the accuracy between single-beam LiDAR performance and the first light curtain placement (row 1 and row 3). This shows that actively placing light curtains on the most uncertain regions can improve performance over a single-beam LiDAR \addition{that performs fixed scans}. Furthermore, placing more light curtains consistently improves detection accuracy.
As an ablation experiment, we train a separate model only on single-beam LiDAR data (row 2), for the same number of training iterations. This is different from row 1 which was trained with both single beam LiDAR and light curtain data but evaluated using only data for a single beam LiDAR. Although training a model with only single-beam LiDAR data (row 2) improves performance over row 1, it is still significantly outperformed by our method which uses data from light curtain placements.
\textbf{Noise simulations}: In order to simulate noise in the real-world sensor, we perform experiments with added noise in the light curtain input. We demonstrate that the results are comparable to the noiseless case, indicating that our method is robust to noise and is likely to transfer well to the real world. Please see Appendix~\ref{app:noise} for more details.
\subsection{Comparison with alternative light curtain placement strategies}
\begin{table*}[!b]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{?c?c|c|c|c?c|c|c|c?}
\Xhline{0.8pt}
& \multicolumn{4}{c?}{\bf{Virtual KITTI}} & \multicolumn{4}{c?}{\bf{SYNTHIA}}\\
\hline
& \multicolumn{2}{c|}{3D mAP} & \multicolumn{2}{c?}{BEV mAP} & \multicolumn{2}{c|}{3D mAP} & \multicolumn{2}{c?}{BEV mAP}\\
\hline
& .5 IoU & .7 IoU & .5 IoU & .7 IoU & .5 IoU & .7 IoU & .5 IoU & .7 IoU\\
\Xhline{0.8pt}
Random & 41.29 & 17.49 & 46.65 & 38.09 & 60.43 & 47.09 & 60.66 & 58.14 \\
\hline
Fixed depth - 15m& 44.99 & 22.20 & 46.07 & 38.05 & 60.74 & 48.16 & 60.89 & 58.48 \\
\hline
Fixed depth - 30m& 39.72 & 19.05 & 45.21 & 35.83 & 60.02 & 47.88 & 60.23 & 57.89 \\
\hline
Fixed depth - 45m& 39.86 & 20.02 & 40.61 & 36.87 & 60.23 & 48.12 & 60.43 & 57.77 \\
\hline
\makecell{Greedy Optimization\\(Randomly break ties)}& 37.40 & 19.93 & 42.80 & 35.33 & 60.62 & 47.46 & 60.83 & 58.22\\
\hline
\makecell{Greedy Optimization\\(Min laser angle change)}& 39.20 & 20.19 & 44.80 & 36.94 & 60.61 & 47.05 & 60.76 & 58.07 \\
\hline
\makecell{Frontoparallel +\\Uncertainty} & 39.41 & 21.25 & 45.10 & 37.80 & 60.36 & 47.20 & 60.52 & 58.00 \\
\hline
\textbf{Ours} & \bf{58.01} & \bf{35.29} & \bf{58.51} & \bf{47.05} & \bf{68.79} & \bf{55.99} & \bf{68.97} & \bf{59.63} \\
\Xhline{0.8pt}
\end{tabular}
\caption{Baselines for alternate light curtain placement strategies, trained and tested on (a) Virtual KITTI and (b) SYNTHIA datasets. Our dynamic programming optimization approach significantly outperforms all other strategies.}
\label{table:baselines}
\end{table*}
In our approach, light curtains are placed by maximizing the coverage of uncertain regions using a dynamic programming optimization. How does this compare to other strategies for light curtain placement? We experiment with several baselines:
\begin{enumerate}
\item \textit{Random}: we place frontoparallel light curtains at a random $z$-distance from the sensor, ignoring the detector's uncertainty map.
\item \textit{Fixed depth}: we place a frontoparallel light curtain at a fixed $z$-distance (15m, 30m, 45m) from the sensor, ignoring the detector's uncertainty map.
\item \textit{Greedy optimization}: this baseline tries to evaluate the benefits of using a dynamic programming optimization. Here, we use the same light curtain constraints described in Section~\ref{sec:dp} (Figure~\ref{fig:dp}(a)). We greedily select the next control point based on local uncertainty instead of optimizing for the future sum of uncertainties. Ties are broken by (a) choosing smaller laser angle changes, and (b) randomly.
\item \textit{Frontoparallel + Uncertainty}: Our optimization process finds light curtains with flexible shapes. What if the shapes were constrained to make the optimization problem easier? If we restrict ourselves to frontoparallel curtains, we can place them at the $z$-distance of maximum uncertainty by simply summing the uncertainties for every fixed value of $z$.
\end{enumerate}
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\subfloat[Generalization in Virtual KITTI]{
\includegraphics[trim=12 13 10 10,clip,width=0.485\textwidth]{figures/lcg/vkitti.png}
}
\subfloat[Generalization in SYNTHIA]{
\includegraphics[trim=12 13 10 10,clip,width=0.485\textwidth]{figures/lcg/synthia.png}
}
\caption{\textit{Generalization to many more light curtains than what the detector was trained for}. We train using online data generation on single-beam lidar and only 3 light curtains. We then test with placing 10 curtains, on (a) Virtual KITTI, and (b) SYNTHIA. Performance continues to increase monotonically according to \addition{multiple} metrics. Takeaway: one can safely place more light curtains at test time and expect to see sustained improvement in accuracy.}
\label{fig:lcg}
\vspace{-10pt}
\end{figure}
The results on the Virtual KITTI and SYNTHIA datasets are shown in Table~\ref{table:baselines}. Our method significantly and consistently outperforms all baselines. This empirically demonstrates the value of using dynamic programming for light curtain placement to improve object detection performance.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[trim=3 0 0 0,clip,width=\textwidth]{figures/qualitative/success_final.png}
\caption{\textit{Successful cases:} Other type of successful cases than Fig.~\ref{fig:pull}. In (A), \addition{the} single-beam LiDAR incorrectly detects a bus and a piece of lawn as false positives. They get eliminated successively after placing \addition{the} first and second light curtains. In (B), \addition{the} first light curtain fixes misalignment in the bounding box predicted by the single beam LiDAR.}
\label{fig:qual-success}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Generalization to successive light curtain placements}
If we train a detector using our online light curtain data generation approach for $k$ light curtains, can the performance generalize to more than $k$ light curtains? Specifically, if we continue to place light curtains beyond the number trained for, will the accuracy continue improving? We test this hypothesis by evaluating on 10 light curtains, many more than the model was trained for (3 light curtains). Figure~\ref{fig:lcg} shows the performance as a function of the number of light curtains. We find that in both Virtual KITTI and SYNTHIA, the accuracy monotonically improves with the number of curtains.
This result implies that a priori one need not worry about how many light curtains will be placed at test time. If we train on only 3 light curtains, we can place many more light curtains at test time; our results indicate that the performance will keep improving.
\subsection{Qualitative analysis}
We visualized a successful case of our method in Fig.~\ref{fig:pull}. This is an example where our method detects false negatives missed by the single-beam LiDAR. We also show two other types of successful cases where light curtains remove false positive detections and fix misalignment errors in Figure~\ref{fig:qual-success}. In Figure~\ref{fig:qual-failure}, we show the predominant failure case of our method. See captions for more details.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[trim=0 0 2 0,clip,width=\textwidth]{figures/qualitative/failure_final.png}
\caption{\textit{Failure cases:} The predominant failure mode is that the single beam LiDAR detects a false positive which is not removed by light curtains because the detector is overly confident in its prediction (so the estimated uncertainty is low). \textit{Middle}: Falsely detecting a tree to be a car. \textit{Right}: After three light curtains, the detection persists because light curtains do not get placed on this false positive.}
\label{fig:qual-failure}
\end{figure}
The predominant failure case of our method is when the LiDAR makes a mistake, such as a false positive in Fig.~\ref{fig:qual-failure}, but the light curtain fails to be placed in that region to fix the mistake. This happens when the detector makes a mistake but is very confident in its prediction; in such a case, the estimated uncertainty for this prediction will be low and a light curtain may not be placed at this location. In this particular example shown, after six light curtain placements, a light curtain eventually gets placed at the location of the false positive and the detector fixes its mistake. However, in other examples, a light curtain might never be placed at the location of the incorrect detection, due to an overly confident (but incorrect) prediction.
\section{Conclusions}
In this work, we develop a method to use light curtains, an actively controllable resource-efficient sensor, for object recognition in static scenes. We propose to use a 3D object detector's prediction uncertainty as a guide for deciding where to sense. By encoding the constraints of the light curtain into a graph, we show how to optimally and feasibly place a light curtain that maximizes the coverage of uncertain regions. We are able to train an active detector that interacts with light curtains to iteratively and efficiently sense parts of scene in an uncertainty-guided manner, successively improving detection accuracy. \addition{We hope this work pushes towards replacing expensive multi-beam LiDAR systems with inexpensive controllable sensors, enabled by} designing perception algorithms for autonomous driving that integrate sensing and recognition.
\section{Introduction}
3D sensors, such as LiDAR, have become ubiquitous for perception in autonomous systems operating in the real world, such as self-driving vehicles and field robots. Combined with recent advances in deep-learning based visual recognition systems, they have lead to significant breakthroughs in perception for autonomous driving, enabling the recent surge of commercial interest in self-driving technology.
However, most 3D sensors in use today \addition{perform \textit{passive perception}}, meaning that they continuously sense the entire environment while being completely decoupled from the recognition system that will eventually process the sensor data. In such a case, sensing the entire scene can be potentially inefficient. For example, consider an object detector running on a self-driving car that is trying to recognize objects in its environment. Suppose that it is confident that a tree-like structure on the side of the street is not a vehicle, but it is unsure whether an object turning around the curb is a vehicle or a pedestrian. In such a scenario, it might be beneficial if the 3D sensor focuses on collecting more data from the latter object, rather than distributing its sensing capacity uniformly throughout the scene.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{figures/pull4.png}
\caption{\textit{Object detection using light curtains.} (a) Scene with 4 cars; ground-truth boxes shown in green. (b) Sparse green points are from a single-beam LiDAR; it can detect only two cars (red boxes). Numbers above detections boxes are confidence scores. Uncertainty map in greyscale is displayed underneath: whiter means higher uncertainty. (c) First light curtain (blue) is placed to optimally cover the most uncertain regions. Dense points (green) from light curtain results in detecting 2 more cars. (d) Second light curtain senses even more points and fixes the misalignment error in the leftmost detection.}
\label{fig:pull}
\vspace{-10pt}
\end{figure}
In this work, we propose a method for 3D object detection \addition{using sensors that perform \textit{active perception}}, i.e. sensors that can be purposefully controlled to sense specific regions in the environment. Programmable light curtains~\cite{wang2018programmable,Bartels_2019_ICCV} were recently proposed as \addition{controllable}, light-weight, and resource efficient sensors that measure the presence of objects intersecting any vertical ruled surface whose shape can be specified by the user (see Fig.~\ref{fig:illustration}). There are two main advantages of using programmable light curtains over LiDARs. First, they can be cheaply constructed, since light curtains use ordinary CMOS sensors (a current lab-built prototype costs \$1000, and the price is expected to go down significantly in production). In contrast, a 64-beam Velodyne LiDAR that is commonly used in 3D self-driving datasets like KITTI~\cite{geiger2013vision} costs upwards of \$80,000. Second, light curtains generate data with much higher resolution in regions where they actively focus~\cite{Bartels_2019_ICCV} while LiDARs sense the entire environment and have low spatial and angular resolution
One weakness of light curtains is that they are able to sense only a subset of the environment -- a vertical ruled surface (see Fig.~\ref{fig:pull}(c,d), Fig~\ref{fig:illustration}). In contrast, a LiDAR senses the entire scene. To mitigate this weakness, we can take advantage of the fact that the light curtain is a \addition{\emph{controllable}} sensor -- we can choose where to place the light curtains. Thus, we must intelligently place light curtains in the appropriate locations, so that they sense the most important parts of the scene. In this work, we develop an algorithm for determining how to best place the light curtains for maximal detection performance
We propose to use a deep neural network's prediction uncertainty as a guide for determining how to actively sense an environment. Our insight is that if a \addition{controllable} sensor images the regions which the network is most uncertain about, the data obtained from those regions can help resolve the network's uncertainty and improve recognition. Conveniently, most deep learning based recognition systems output confidence maps, which can be used for this purpose when converted to an appropriate notion of uncertainty.
Given neural network uncertainty estimates, we show how a light curtain can be placed to \textit{optimally} cover the regions of maximum uncertainty. First, we use an information-gain based framework to propose placing light curtains that maximize the sum of uncertainties of the covered region (Sec.~\ref{sec:objective}, Appendix~\ref{app:info-gain}). However, the structure of the light curtain and physical constraints of the device impose restrictions on how the light curtain can be placed. Our novel solution is to precompute a ``constraint graph'', which describes all possible light curtain placements that respect these physical constraints. We then use an optimization approach based on dynamic programming to efficiently search over all possible feasible paths in the constraint graph and maximize this objective (Sec.~\ref{sec:dp}). This is a novel approach to constrained optimization of a controllable sensor's trajectory which takes advantage of the properties of the problem we are trying to solve.
Our proposed active \addition{perception} pipeline for 3D detection proceeds as follows. We initially record sparse data with an inexpensive single beam LIDAR sensor \addition{that performs fixed 3D scans}. This data is input to a 3D point cloud object detector, which outputs an initial set of detections and confidence estimates. These confidence estimates are converted into uncertainty estimates, which are used by our dynamic programming algorithm to determine where to place the first light curtain. The output of the light curtain readings are again input to the 3D object detector to obtain refined detections and an updated uncertainty map. This process of estimating detections and placing new light curtains can be repeated multiple times (Fig.~\ref{fig:pipeline}). Hence, we are able to sense the environment progressively, intelligently, and efficiently.
We evaluate our algorithm using two synthetic datasets of urban driving scenes~\cite{vkitti,synthia}. Our experiments demonstrate that our algorithm leads to a monotonic improvement in performance with successive light curtain placements.
We compare our proposed optimal light curtain placement strategy to multiple baseline strategies and find that they are significantly outperformed by our method.
To summarize, our contributions are the following:
\begin{itemize}
\item[$\bullet$] We propose a method for using a deep learning based 3D object detector's prediction uncertainty as a guide for active sensing \addition{(Sec.~\ref{sec:uncertainty-extraction})}.
\item[$\bullet$] \addition{Given a network's uncertainty, we derive an optimization objective to decide where to place light curtains using the principle of maximizing information gain (Sec.~\ref{sec:objective}, Appendix~\ref{app:info-gain}).}
\item[$\bullet$]
Our novel contribution is to encode the physical constraints of the device into a graph and use dynamic-programming based graph optimization to efficiently maximize the objective while satisfying the physical constraints (Sec.~\ref{sec:objective}, \ref{sec:dp}).
\item[$\bullet$] We show how to train such an active detector using online light curtain data generation \addition{(Sec.~\ref{sec:online-training})}.
\item[$\bullet$] We empirically demonstrate that our approach \addition{successively improves detection performance over LiDAR and} is significantly better compared to a number of baseline approaches \addition{(Sec.~\ref{sec:experiments})}.
\end{itemize}
\section{Background on Light Curtains}
\label{sec:background}
\begin{figure}[t]
\vspace{-15pt}
\centering
\subfloat[Working principle]{
\includegraphics[trim=0 0 0 0,clip,width=0.35\textwidth]{figures/illustration/working_principle_2.png}
}
\subfloat[Optical schematic (top view)]{
\includegraphics[trim=0 0 0 0,clip,width=0.45\textwidth]{figures/illustration/optical_schematic_new2.png}
}
\caption{Illustration of programmable light curtains adapted from~\cite{Bartels_2019_ICCV,wang2018programmable}. a) The light curtain is placed at the intersection of the illumination plane (from the projector) and the imaging plane (from the camera). b) A programmable galvanometer and a rolling shutter camera create multiple points of intersection, $\mathbf{X}_t$.
}
\label{fig:illustration}
\vspace{-10pt}
\end{figure}
\noindent Programmable \textit{light curtains}~\cite{wang2018programmable,Bartels_2019_ICCV} are a sensor for adaptive depth sensing. ``Light curtains'' can be thought of as virtual surfaces placed in the environment. They can detect points on objects that intersect this surface. Before explaining how the curtain is created, we briefly describe our coordinate system and the basics of a rolling shutter camera.\\
\textbf{Coordinate system:} Throughout the paper, we will use the standard camera coordinate system centered at the sensor. We assume that the $z$ axis corresponds to depth from the sensor pointing forward, and that the $y$ vector points vertically downwards. Hence the $xz$-plane is parallel to the ground and corresponds to a top-down view, also referred to as the bird's eye view.\\%\sid{I will mark the coordinate axes in figures 2, 3, 4}.\\
\textbf{Rolling shutter camera}: A rolling shutter camera contains pixels arranged in $T$ number of vertical columns. Each pixel column corresponds to a vertical imaging plane. Readings from only those visible 3D points that lie on the imaging plane get recorded onto its pixel column. We will denote the $xz$-projection of the imaging plane corresponding to the $t$-th pixel column by ray $\mathbf{R}_t$, shown in the top-down view in Fig.~\ref{fig:illustration}(b). We will refer to these as ``camera rays''. The camera has a rolling shutter that successively activates each pixel column and its imaging plane one at a time from left to right. The time interval between the activation of two adjacent pixel columns is determined by the pixel clock.\\
\textbf{Working principle of light curtains:} The latest version of light curtains~\cite{Bartels_2019_ICCV} works by rapidly rotating a light sheet laser in synchrony with the motion of a camera's rolling shutter. A laser beam is collimated and shaped into a line sheet using appropriate lenses and is reflected at a desired angle using a controllable galvanometer mirror (see Fig.~\ref{fig:illustration}(b)). The illumination plane created by the laser intersects the active imaging plane of the camera in a vertical line along the curtain profile (Fig.~\ref{fig:illustration}(a)). The $xz$-projection of this vertical line intersecting the $t$-th imaging plane lies on $\mathbf{R}_t$, and we call this the $t$-th ``control point", denoted by $\mathbf{X}_t$ (Fig.~\ref{fig:illustration}(b)).\\
\textbf{Light curtain input}: The shape of a light curtain is uniquely defined by where it intersects each camera ray in the $xz$-plane, i.e. the control points $\{\mathbf{X}_1, \dots, \mathbf{X}_T\}$. These will act as inputs to the light curtain device. In order to produce the light curtain defined by $\{\mathbf{X}_t\}_{t=1}^T$, the galvanometer is programmed to compute and rotate at, for each camera ray $\mathbf{R}_t$, the reflection angle $\theta_t(\mathbf{X}_t)$ of the laser beam such that the laser sheet intersects $\mathbf{R}_t$ at $\mathbf{X}_t$. By selecting a control point on each camera ray, the light curtain device can be made to image any vertical ruled surface~\cite{Bartels_2019_ICCV,wang2018programmable}.\\
\textbf{Light curtain output}: The light curtain outputs a point cloud of all 3D visible points in the scene that intersect the light curtain surface. The density of light curtain points on the surface is usually much higher than LiDAR points.\\
\textbf{Light curtain constraints}: The rotating galvanometer can only operate at a maximum angular velocity $\omega_\text{max}$.
Let $\mathbf{X}_t$ and $\mathbf{X}_{t+1}$ be the control points on two consecutive camera rays $\mathbf{R}_t$ and $\mathbf{R}_{t+1}$. These induce laser angles $\theta(\mathbf{X}_t)$ and $\theta(\mathbf{X}_{t+1})$ respectively. If $\Delta t$ is the time difference between when the $t$-th and $(t+1)$-th pixel columns are active, the galvanometer needs to rotate by an angle of $\Delta \theta(\mathbf{X}_t) = \theta(\mathbf{X}_{t+1}) - \theta(\mathbf{X}_t)$ within $\Delta t$ time. Denote $\Delta \theta_\text{max} = \omega_\text{max} \cdot \Delta t$. Then the light curtain can only image control points subject to $|\theta(\mathbf{X}_{t+1}) - \theta(\mathbf{X}_t)| \leq \Delta \theta_\text{max},\ \forall 1 \leq t < T$.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 7,354 |
The Last Days of the Sioux Nation
# _THE LAST DAYS OF THE SIOUX NATION_
_Second Edition_
_Robert M. Utley_
Copyright © 1963 by Yale University
New material for Second Edition Copyright © 2004 by
Yale University
Originally published as Yale Western Americana Series, 3
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2003116919
ISBN 0-300-10316-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
_The Red man was the true American. They have almost all gone, but will never be forgotten. The history of how they faught for their country is written in blood, a stain that time cannot grinde out. Their God was the sun their church all out doors. Their only book was nature and they knew all the pages_.
_Charles M. Russell_
## _Contents_
List of Illustrations
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface
1. The Field of Wounded Knee
2. The Old Life
3. The New Life
4. The Land Agreement
5. The Indian Messiah
6. Crisis for the Sioux Agents
7. The Army Moves In
8. Brooke Tries for Peace
9. The End of Sitting Bull
10. Big Foot
11. The Search for the Miniconjous
12. Wounded Knee
13. Drexel Mission
14. Tightening the Ring
15. The Final Reckoning
Bibliography
Index
## _List of Illustrations_
**_Following page 166_**
1. Pine Ridge Agency; courtesy National Archives
2. The Crook Commission; courtesy National Archives
3. A Ghost Dance; photograph by A. G. Johnson, York, Neb., courtesy Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology
4. American Horse and Red Cloud; Grabill Collection, courtesy Library of Congress
5. Sitting Bull; courtesy National Archives
6. Red Tomahawk; courtesy Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology
7. Short Bull and Kicking Bear; courtesy National Archives
8. Big Foot's Ghost Dancers; Grabill Collection, courtesy Library of Congress
9. Gen. Nelson A. Miles; courtesy Custer Battlefield National Monument, Mont.
10. Big Foot; courtesy National Archives
11. Little Wound; courtesy Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology
12. Brig. Gen. John R. Brooke; courtesy National Archives
13. Officers of the Seventh Cavalry; Grabill Collection, courtesy James S. Hutchins, Tucson, Ariz.
14. Troop of the Seventh Cavalry; courtesy Col. W. W. Whitside (son of Maj. S. M. Whitside), Front Royal, Va.
15. Hotchkiss Battery; Grabill Collection, courtesy James S. Hutchins, Tucson, Ariz.
16. The Field of Wounded Knee; courtesy Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology
17. Burial of the dead at Wounded Knee; courtesy Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology
18. Two Strike, Crow Dog, and High Hawk; courtesy Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology
19. General Miles and staff; Grabill Collection, courtesy Library of Congress
20. Sioux camp at Pine Ridge. Grabill Collection, courtesy Library of Congress
21. Buffalo Bill and Sioux chiefs; Grabill Collection, courtesy Library of Congress
22. Plenty Horses; Grabill Collection, courtesy Library of Congress
23. Ghost Dancers at Fort Sheridan; courtesy State Historical Society of Colorado
24. Wounded Knee Battlefield; photo by Ray H. Mattison, courtesy National Park Service
**_Maps, by Walter T. Vitous page_**
1. Reduction of the Great Sioux Reservation, 1868 to 1890
2. The Sioux Reservations, 1890
3. Standing Rock Agency and Vicinity, 1890
4. The Sioux Campaign of 1890–91: Area of Operations
5. The Battle of Wounded Knee Creek, December 29, 1890
## _Preface to the Second Edition_
I BEGIN BY CONFESSING that I think _The Last Days of the Sioux Nation_ is the wrong title for this book. Not only does "nation" misconstrue nineteenth-century Sioux political organization, but the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee did not represent the final days of the Sioux tribes. They went on doing what they had been doing for generations—adapting. They still live, vibrant, proud, defined by selfidentity—and adapting. Yet Wounded Knee cannot be discounted as a significant turning point in the process of adaptation. It ended one era and opened another in the lives of the Sioux people. Still, if I were revising this book today, I would seek a more accurate title.
Other confessions are in order. This was to have been my doctoral dissertation at Indiana University when I got out of the army. I did most of the research while assigned to the Historical Section of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, in 1954–57. Owing to the responsibilities of a new family and the lure of writing history for the government, I did not return to Indiana but ended up embarking on a career in the National Park Service. I drafted the text of this book while assigned to the service's Southwest Regional Office in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1958–61. At the founding meeting of the Western History Association in Santa Fe in October 1961, David Horne of Yale University Press thrilled me by expressing interest in the book for Yale's new Western Americana Series. That is where it appeared, as the third book in the series, in 1963.
The point of this autobiographical digression is to stress that I wrote the book at least a decade before Indian studies became fashionable. Such anthropologists as Clark Wissler and Robert Lowie provided valuable perspectives from the early twentieth century, but a host of insightful ethnohistorians did not begin to probe deeply into fundamental cultural issues until the 1970s. Calvin Martin, Raymond DeMallie, Colin Calloway, Francis Jennings, Wilbur Jacobs, Wilcomb Washburn, Frederick Hoxie, and Robert Berkhofer come to mind. In a later work, _The Indian Frontier of the American West_ (University of New Mexico Press, 1984; revised edition 2003), I emphasized Calvin Martin's thesis that Indian-white relations were best understood in terms of two radically different "thoughtworlds" condemned never to understand each other, forever to talk past each other.
Readers of this new edition of _The Last Days of the Sioux Nation_ should bear in mind that in the late 1950s I did not have these perspectives to draw on. I tried hard to get inside the Indian thought-world, but some of my judgments betray my white thought world.
On the most elementary level, I would clean up some of the wording. I would degenderize the text. I have long since ceased to characterize any Indians as "hostiles" or as "tame" or "wild." I would no longer call the Ghost Dance a "craze." "Frenzy," "fanatical," and "orgy of dancing" would also be deleted. I would not label the old spiritual beliefs "pagan." I might not even apply the word "religion" to any aspect of the spiritual world of the Sioux, for it would carry connotations of the mold into which the Christian missionaries were attempting to force that spiritual world. Although I did not call Indian women "squaws," I would not now refer to mix-bloods as "squaw men" or "half-breeds."
In 1982 anthropologist Raymond DeMallie wrote a reasoned analysis of the Ghost Dance in which he criticized the "consensus" interpretation, of which he selected mine as the most prominent example. ("The Lakota Ghost Dance: An Ethnohistorical Account," _Pacific Historical Review_ 51 [October 1982]: 385–405). A major emphasis was that the Ghost Dance was not an isolated phenomenon to be treated as separate from the traditional Lakota beliefs and practices. Rather, it was a stage in spiritual concepts that had been changing for generations, concepts that by the 1880s had also been influenced by Christianity.
Thus DeMallie takes issue with me for writing that after Wounded Knee, "the reality of the conquest descended upon the entire Nation with such overwhelming force that it shattered all illusions." It did not, he avers. The Ghost Dance was merely "part of the religious history of the Lakota people," and its collapse led to "new beliefs, new philosophies," and ultimately "a major intellectual reworking of the epistemological foundations of Lakota culture." In other words, the Sioux adapted, as they had been doing for generations. DeMallie is right.
I am also faulted for crediting the Sioux with understanding that the reservation meant the end of the old life. "That the vanishing herds symbolized their own vanishing ways of life cannot have escaped the Sioux," I wrote. Nonsense, he says in more friendly wording that presents it as a manifestation of "western philosophy." Right again. The Utley thoughtworld attributed beliefs to an Indian thoughtworld to which they would have been alien and incomprehensible.
Finally, DeMallie rejects the "consensus" that the catastrophes that befell the Sioux during the 1880s caused them to pervert a doctrine of pacifism into one of militance. He is correct that the Sioux were essentially nonviolent until the army invaded the reservations and precipitated armed defense against government interference in the dancing. Although nonviolent, however, the dance displayed enough trappings of militance to alarm nearby settlers. The Ghost Shirt, with its promise to deflect the bullets of the white soldiers, and the rhetoric of armed resistance to suppression of the dancing, pushed the agencies with new and incompetent agents to the brink of violence. The Ghost Dance never incited the Sioux to make offensive war, but they stood ready to defend their beliefs with arms if agents or soldiers tried to crush the movement.
Against this background, I stand by my conclusion that the weak agent at Pine Ridge had so completely lost his authority that the excitement and disorder placed the lives of Indians and whites alike in imminent danger. By mid-November 1890, the time had come for the army to take control of Pine Ridge, if not Rosebud.
Readers of this new edition of _Last Days_ should be aware of DeMallie's interpretations, for they modify some of my judgments and interpretations. I did not discover his article until several years after its publication and even then did not accept his interpretations. I do now. Largely this is because DeMallie generously contributed his knowledge and wisdom to my biography of Sitting Bull. _(The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull_ (Henry Holt, 1993). He reviewed the entire manuscript, chapter by chapter. His help proved indispensable, and his counsel fundamentally changed my thinking.
My work on Sitting Bull proved pertinent to _Last Days_ in another way, of less significance but nonetheless important in correcting a major mistake. This was a dramatic scene that occurred when Indian policemen sought to arrest Sitting Bull and ended by killing him instead. Citing Stanley Vestal's biography _Sitting Bull: Champion of the Sioux_ , I repeated the popular story of the old gray circus horse presented to Sitting Bull by Buffalo Bill. When the firing broke out, the horse sat on his haunches and began to perform circus tricks. It makes a wonderful story, but no shred of contemporary evidence supports it. Similar undocumented episodes litter Vestal's publications in such abundance as to make much of what he wrote suspect.
_Last Days_ appeared nearly a decade before the first stirrings of the Red Power movement. Vine Deloria had yet to write _Custer Died for your Sins_ (1968). The American Indian Movement (AIM), featuring the theatrics of Russell Means, lay in the future. Dee Brown was still writing good history instead of perversions like _Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee_ (1970). A 487-page polemic masquerading as history, it contained an 18-page chapter on the Ghost Dance and a 6-page chapter on Wounded Knee. They were as full of unsound history as the other 17 chapters. Yet the title illumined Wounded Knee worldwide, and the contents shaped public thinking about Indians into the twenty-first century.
When I wrote the first edition of this book, Indians had not marched on Washington demanding their rights. They had not occupied Alcatraz Island. They had not taken over and trashed the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington. And Wounded Knee II (1973), featuring an exchange of gunfire between AIM activists and FBI agents at Pine Ridge, had not further inflamed racial relations.
Even so, Wounded Knee had poisoned relations between Indians and whites for seventy years. Until his death in 1925, General Miles excoriated the Seventh Cavalry for massacring women and children at Wounded Knee. Periodically the issue of compensating Indian survivors surfaced in the Congress; then in 1976 the issue of compensating descendants of survivors arose. The years of Indian activism in the 1970s and 1980s highlighted Wounded Knee, even more than the Custer disaster, as the symbol of all the iniquities perpetrated by America and Americans on the Indian tribes.
The symbolism endures, for both Indians and non-Indians. For nearly all people, in the United States and abroad, the words "Wounded Knee" also evoke visions of soldiers flattening an Indian village with artillery and heartlessly gunning down fleeing women and children. It is an article of faith among Indians, especially the Lakotas. They gather periodically at the scene of the carnage to reinforce the image. This image promises to endure indefinitely, a bar to racial reconciliation.
I would make no substantive changes in my description of Wounded Knee. I still see it as a horrible tragedy that neither side intended or expected. The Indians did not plot a battle against the soldiers, as military apologists have sometimes contended. Nor did the army intentionally slaughter noncombatants. After losing thirty troopers in the first exchange of fire, however, the soldiers lashed back with all their firepower. They strove to spare old men, women, and children, both individuals and groups, when not mingled with the fighting men. But when bunched with the fighting men in the smoke, dust, and fury of combat, all were mowed down. This distinction is persuasively explicit in the military records, but of course the Indian survivors, counting the dead women and children, would later tell a different story. So massacre it may be called, a stigma the army will always bear and never succeed in explaining to a public that believes otherwise.
A warm memory lingers with me. At some point in the late 1960s, I gave a speech on an unrelated topic at the historic old hotel in Hot Springs, South Dakota, near the Pine Ridge Reservation. Afterward, a Sioux elder, braided and in traditional garb, introduced himself and, telling me he had read _Last Days_ , said, "All the old people at Pine Ridge, they say that's just how it happened."
## _Preface_
ON JULY 12, 1893, the young historian Frederick Jackson Turner rose before a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago to deliver his since-famous and controversial paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward," he asserted, "explain American development."
Turner had been led to explore the fruitful topic of the influence of the frontier by a statement in the report of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890. "At present," the report read, "the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line." Ever since 1893, when Turner expounded his frontier thesis, the year 1890 has been considered to mark the passing of the frontier.
From the beginning, few influences exerted themselves more powerfully upon the frontier than the Indians who resisted the westward advance of the white man. The Indian barrier stretched from Mexico to Canada and often immobilized segments of the frontier for decades at a time. Only when the Indian barrier had been pierced, pushed back, and finally destroyed did the frontier of settlement spread farther into the wilderness.
In 1890 the tragic battle of Wounded Knee Creek and the resulting suppression of the Ghost Dance uprising of the Sioux ended the long history of warfare between the Indian and the white man. Thus, appropriately, and perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the Indian barrier collapsed during the very year in which the Superintendent of the Census found it no longer possible to trace a line of frontier settlement on the map of the West. Coinciding in time with the passing of the frontier, the Sioux troubles of 1890 loom large in the history of frontier America.
The Ghost Dance religion took root in practically every western tribe. The content of the religion and its practice by these tribes found an able chronicler in the Smithsonian Institution's distinguished ethnologist James Mooney, who published his _Ghost-Dance Religion_ in 1896. Perhaps the measure of Mooney's work lies in the fact that no scholar has since tried to tell the story in so comprehensive and exhaustive a fashion. The present work is not intended to replace Mooney. That will never be done. But Mooney's approach was primarily ethnological; mine is primarily historical. Mooney dealt with the Ghost Dance religion among all the tribes of the West; I examine only the Sioux, among whom the consequences were most portentous. Finally, Mooney did not enjoy so great a body of source material as is now available; nor could he benefit from the perspective that, with the passage of seventy years, is now possible. _The Last Days of the Sioux Nation_ , I believe, supplements Mooney's work in many respects and corrects him in others.
I wish to express my gratitude to the many people who gave so freely of their time and talents to help bring this work to a conclusion. To three fine scholars and stylists who read the entire manuscript my special thanks are due for saving me from many blunders and offering valuable suggestions for more effective organization and presentation: Dr. Norman Maclean, Professor of English at the University of Chicago; Lt. Col. Norman E. Cawse-Morgon, Professor of Air Science and Tactics at Union University, Schenectady, New York; and Dr. John Alexander Carroll, Professor of History at the University of Arizona and Editor of _Arizona and the West_.
My appreciation is also extended to those who read and commented upon parts of the manuscript: John C. Ewers, United States National Museum; Roy E. Appleman, National Park Service, Washington, D.C.; Maj. E. S. Luce, San Diego, California; Maurice Frink, State Historical Society of Colorado; Don Rickey, Jr., National Park Service, Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, St. Louis, Missouri; Franklin G. Smith, National Park Service, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Casey Barthelmess, Miles City, Montana; James S. Hutchins, University of Arizona; and Lessing H. Nohl, Jr., University of New Mexico.
For help in research I thank the staffs of the National Archives, Library of Congress, and Bureau of American Ethnology; Donald Danker, Nebraska State Historical Society; Maurice Frink, State Historical Society of Colorado; Don Russell, Chicago Westerners; the late Col. Louis Brechemin; Maj. E. S. Luce; Merrill Mattes, National Park Service; and Col. W. W. Whitside of Front Royal, Virginia.
Finally, this volume would have been unintelligible indeed without the splendid maps executed by Walter T. Vitous of Olympia, Washington.
R.M.U.
_Santa Fe, New Mexico
November 1961_
## _1. THE FIELD OF WOUNDED KNEE_
ON NEW YEAR'S DAY OF 1891, a bright sun broke over the creeks that drained northward into White River. It glared on the three-inch blanket of snow and formed icicles on the scrub pines dotting the ridges that separated the valleys. Three days earlier, on December 29, 1890, the battle had been fought. The next day the first blizzard of the season had swept the Sioux reservations. It raged for two days before roaring southward into Nebraska and Kansas.
Residents of the cluster of dingy frame buildings in the valley of White Clay Creek cleared the snow from porches and walks. On the south, between rank upon rank of neatly aligned A-tents and Sibleys, 700 cavalrymen muffled in muskrat caps and heavy yellow-lined cape overcoats moved about in the snow preparing breakfast and tending horses. Nearby, four times as many Indians, brightly colored blankets drawn around their heads, kindled cookfires among hundreds of conical canvas tepees.
Soon after breakfast a long procession of people, some mounted, others in wagons, wound up the ridge east of Pine Ridge Agency. The road led to the valley of Wounded Knee Creek, eighteen miles distant. There were about seventy-five Oglala Sioux led by the agency physician, Dr. Charles A. Eastman, a full-blooded Santee Sioux. They were anxious to learn if any wounded kinsmen of the Miniconjou Sioux tribe had survived both the terrible conflict of December 29 and the howling blizzard that followed. It seemed improbable. There were also in the group about thirty white men under Paddy Starr, who had negotiated a contract with the military authorities to bury the dead Indians at two dollars a body. And there was a troop of the Seventh United States Cavalry Regiment to see that the burial detail suffered no harm from the hundreds of vengeful warriors roaming the neighborhood.
Shortly after noon the cavalcade drew up at the Wounded Knee battlefield. In silence the people stared at the scene. The crescent of more than 100 tepees that had housed Chief Big Foot's followers had been all but flattened. Strips of shredded canvas and piles of splintered lodgepoles littered the campsite, together with wrecked wagons and twisted pots, kettles, and domestic utensils. Here and there the skeleton of a tepee rose starkly from the wreckage, bits of charred canvas clinging to the poles. Snow-covered mounds cluttered the ground from one end of the camp to the other; beneath them lay the shattered bodies of the victims of the battle. Other mounds dotted the floor and sides of a deep ravine along the edge of the campsite; and beyond, where Colonel Forsyth had tried to parley with the Indian men, the mounds lay thick and numerous.
The Indians with Dr. Eastman burst into cries of anguish, the sharp wails of the men mingling with the sustained moaning of the women. Some sang death songs. "It took all of my nerve to keep my composure in the face of this spectacle," recalled the doctor, "and of the excitement and grief of my Indian companions." The whites, worried lest the Indians lose control of themselves, fidgeted with nervousness. Eastman sent them to examine the mounds for signs of life.
Each mound hid a human form, torn by shrapnel and carbine bullets, caked with blood, frozen hard in the contortions of violent death. They were of all ages and both sexes. The storm of shot and shell had spared none. Paddy Starr found three pregnant women shot to pieces, another woman with her abdomen blown away, a ten-year-old boy with an arm, shoulder, and breast mangled by an artillery shell. Others made similar discoveries.
In the council square, where the bodies lay thickest, one of the mounds yielded the remains of Chief Big Foot. Bundled against the chills of pneumonia in heavy clothes and head scarf, he had died in the first fire. Frozen in a half-sitting position, he now looked out over the snowy field as if surveying in horror the disaster that had befallen his people. Nearby, with the charred remains of a tent surrounding him, lay the burned and swollen body of Yellow Bird, the fiery medicine man who had incited the young men of Big Foot's band to fight rather than give up their guns to the soldiers.
Not all were dead. Beneath a wagon, partly protected from the storm, Eastman found a blind and helpless old woman who had escaped injury and lived through three days of freezing temperature. In Louis Mosseau's trading post, where the road crossed the creek, the searchers found more sparks of life. Several wounded people had dragged themselves into the store. Some had died but others still lived. Beneath a mound of snow, Eastman discovered a little girl, about four months old, lying beside her dead mother, who had been pierced by two bullets. The infant was wrapped in a shawl, and on her head was a buckskin cap bearing in embroidered beadwork the design of the American flag. She was mildly frostbitten but otherwise unharmed. In all, the searchers collected five adults and two children who were still living. "All of this," observed the Indian doctor, "was a severe ordeal for one who had so lately put all his faith in the Christian love and lofty ideals of the white man."
The wounded were eased into wagons and driven back to Pine Ridge Agency. There they joined the other wounded survivors brought in by the soldiers on the night of the battle in the hospital improvised by Reverend Charles Cook (another educated Indian) in his mission chapel. One old man, badly wounded, was tearfully greeted by his wife and children, who had supposed him dead. Two days later he died.
The infant in the buckskin cap, now an orphan, was adopted by Brig. Gen. L. W. Colby, commander of the Nebraska militia troops recently mobilized to protect the settlements, and was reared in his home as Marguerite Colby. Some of the Indian women called her Zintka Lanuni, "Lost Bird"; others named her Ikicize-Wanji-Cinca, "Child of the Battlefield." Two other children, also orphaned by the battle, had been saved on the 29th. They, too, found foster homes—one, a son of Yellow Bird, with schoolteacher Lucy Arnold; the other, a girl of five, with Capt. George Sword, head of the Pine Ridge Indian Police.
Working at their grim task, the burial detail remained on the field through the following day, January 2. On top of the hill from which the artillery had raked the Indian camp, the men dug a rectangular pit to serve as a mass grave. The bodies were gathered up and stacked on the hill. In all, there were 146. William Peano, member of the burial party, recorded 102 men and women of adult age, 24 old men, 7 old women, 6 boys between five and eight years old, and 7 babies under two.
Some whites stripped part of the corpses for Ghost Shirts and other mementos of the occasion. Then, still frozen stiff, the bodies were dumped unceremoniously into the hole. "It was a thing to melt the heart of a man, if it was of stone," said one observer, "to see those little children, with their bodies shot to pieces, thrown naked into the pit." When the last body had been rolled into the grave, the whites lined up around it and had their picture taken. Then they shoveled dirt into the pit and rode back to the agency.
Later, the missionaries built a church in front of the grave, and in 1903 the Indians erected a monument over it. The inscription reads:
This monument is erected by surviving relatives and other Ogalalla and Cheyenne River Sioux Indians in memory of the Chief Big Foot Massacre Dec. 29, 1890. Col. Forsyth in command of U.S. troops. Big Foot was a great chief of the Sioux Indians. He often said, "I will stand in peace till my last day comes." He did many good and brave deeds for the white man and the red man. Many innocent women and children who knew no wrong died here.
It was true. Many innocent women and children died there. What is more, the Sioux Nation died there. Before Wounded Knee, despite more than ten years of reservation life, the Sioux had never really accepted the reality of their conquest by the United States Army. They still harbored illusions that the day of liberation would come, that somehow, someday, they would return to the way of life their fathers had known, to the time when no white men interfered with their religion, their economic system, their government, their society. Indeed, this was the meaning behind the Ghost Dance movement that culminated in Wounded Knee.
After Wounded Knee, even though only a tiny fraction of the Sioux Nation met death, the reality of the conquest descended upon the entire Nation with such overwhelming force that it shattered all illusions. Progressively, after December 29, 1890, the cohesion that bound the Teton Sioux tribes to one another grew looser. Progressively, the unity of tribes and bands weakened. Progressively, the individuals fitted into the mold of the reservation system.
The Sioux thus suffered two conquests: a military conquest and a psychological conquest. It was the latter that destroyed them as a nation and left emotional scars that persist today. But the road that ended in the second conquest began before the first. It began in the old life.
## _2. THE OLD LIFE_
Sioux OF THE 1880s recalled with nostalgia the way of life that the white man had set out to destroy after the military conquest. It was a way of life, they seemed to think, that had endured changeless since antiquity and that had no place in it for white men. Actually, as the life span of a people is reckoned, the old life was not so very old. Paradoxically, it had been made possible by the white man, and the white man had played a continuing, vital role in it.
There were many varieties of Sioux. This story is about the Teton Sioux, or Teton Dakota. "Dakota" and "Sioux" are the same people—"Dakota" meaning allies and "Sioux" a name given them by their enemies, meaning enemy. Originally the Sioux were forest people who dwelt in the lake region around the head of the Mississippi River. They lived in semipermanent houses of pole, earth, and bark and subsisted on berries, fish, and game, procured on foot. Then, during the first half of the eighteenth century, French traders moved up from the southeast, equipping the Chippewas, bitter enemies of the Sioux, with firearms. No longer could the Sioux hold their own against the Chippewas, and, with food growing increasingly scarce anyway, they drifted westward, up the Minnesota River Valley.
Some of the Sioux continued to the treeless prairies beyond and around 1760 began to reach the Missouri River in mounting numbers. These people who pushed westward to the Missouri, and later still farther west, became the Teton Sioux. By the opening of the nineteenth century they had evolved into one of seven well-defined divisions of the Sioux confederation. The Teton division was itself a loose confederation of seven tribes: Oglala, Brulé, Hunkpapa, Miniconjou, Sans Arc, Two Kettle, and Blackfeet. Each of the seven tribes in turn subdivided itself into numerous bands of changing size and composition.
The Teton division, like the parent Sioux confederation, had no form of central government, and the tribe and band thus commanded the largest share of the allegiance and affection of the people. But kinship and similar customs, history, and danger forged strong bonds among the Teton tribes. Even though they rarely achieved unity of action, there was a unity of spirit that more or less justified the label applied to the Tetons in later years by the white man—the Sioux Nation.
Two significant gifts of the white man, combined with and applied to the economic imperatives of the land in which they had now chosen to live, dramatically changed the life of the Tetons from that of the lake and forest country. In the decades of the migration they at last began to acquire firearms from the French traders to the east. And from the Indian tribes to the west and south they acquired the horse, which had been introduced into the Southwest by the Spanish two and a half centuries earlier. These innovations made possible the political, economic, social, and religious life that evolved in the century preceding the conquest.
The great herds of buffalo ranging the new Teton homeland profoundly shaped this way of life. Indeed, in few other areas of the world has a single animal played so conspicuous a role in the culture of a people. Although the Tetons hunted all game animals, it was the buffalo that furnished the means of supplying nearly every material want. Buffalo meat was the staff of life and constituted the largest item of diet. Folklore credits the Indian with making use of every part of the animal, and in fact he did in times of scarcity; in times of plenty he enjoyed only the choice parts, like the tongue and hump, and discarded the rest. The hide of the buffalo provided material for clothing and moccasins, for bed covers, for "bull boats" used in stream crossings, and for every kind of container. Dressed hides sewn together and stretched over a conical framework of poles formed the familiar tepee, which provided an easily transported yet comfortable year-round shelter. Hoofs, horns, and bones found a variety of uses—ceremonial trappings, cooking utensils, awls, chisels, hide-scrapers, and other tools. Intestines and bladders were used to carry water. Sinews furnished rope, thread, and bowstrings. Hair was put to a wide range of utilitarian purposes. On the treeless prairie even the droppings were burned as fuel. Occupying so prominent a place in the material culture of the Tetons, the buffalo loomed significantly in the Tetons' conception of the universe and in their body of religious beliefs and practices. For the Plains Indians the disappearance of the buffalo was a catastrophe.
Because the buffalo were migratory, the Tetons became nomads. Living in portable skin tepees, with mobility afforded by the horse, they scattered over the plains west of the Missouri River and north of the Arkansas River. Individual bands of a tribe went their separate ways during part of the year. Each spring they gathered at a pre-arranged rendezvous and took their places in the tribal circle. As a tribe they devoted a major share of the summer to killing game and preparing the meat for winter. The organization and conduct of the hunt required elaborate rituals and for its duration consumed the energy and enthusiasm of the entire tribe. In late autumn the tribe again broke up, and the bands scattered for the winter.
Vital though the buffalo was, the Teton economy was never purely primitive. White traders supplied numerous useful items —firearms, pots, kettles, knives, awls, even beads for decoration —and in return received animal furs and skins. The Tetons regarded trade goods as indispensable, and they rarely got through a year without a journey to the trading post or a visit from an itinerant trader. Even before the close of the eighteenth century, traders had appeared on the Upper Missouri. After Lewis and Clark showed the way, the great fur companies spread up the Missouri and the Platte to play a cherished and essential role in the Teton way of life.
Ranging over a vast country, ceaselessly on the move, ever-active whether in war or in the hunt, the Teton warrior despised restraint. Self-discipline was the strongest curb on individual desires that conflicted with group welfare. But group living required group restraint, and a simple political organization evolved.
Each band had its own chief, but he was not an absolute despot ruling the destinies of his people. His duties were to carry out the will of the majority and to guard the band's customs, traditions, and religion. He could influence opinion, but he rarely acted in important matters without a mandate from the people. The rank of chief might be inherited, or attained through force of character, success in war, and acquisition of wealth. No single chief ruled the entire tribe. When the bands assembled in the summer months, such authority as existed rested in the tribal council, which governed through executive deputies and a corps of tribal soldiers. Among the Oglalas, for example, the council consisted of seven band chiefs chosen by the older men of the tribe. Their deputies, four distinguished young men, wore shirts fringed with hair as badges of office, and were called the Shirt Wearers. They governed in the name of the council and within the policy framework set by the council. They enforced their authority and that of the council through tribal soldiers, or policemen, chosen from a men's society called the _Akicita_. Given the individualistic temperament of the Sioux, these policemen commanded surprising obedience. The Oglalas explained to the anthropologist Clark Wissler that the Akicita were
those who see that there is general order in camp when traveling from one place to another; those who attend to the duties of overseeing the buffalo hunt so that no one may chase the buffalo singly; those who see that all can charge the buffalo at once or split the party so that when one chases the buffalo one way, the other band closes in; and those who supervise the chase to get better results. They also see that no one kills another, but in case one does, they either kill him or destroy all his property, kill his horses, destroy his tipi, etc.
This system of tribal government operated only during the summer months, when the bands came together as a tribe to hunt and to make war. It worked well enough, but when increasing numbers of whites moved westward in the middle nineteenth century, posing a sustained menace to the Indian way of life, it proved too weak. Paradoxically, the white officials injected more authoritarianism into the system. Ignorant of the realities of Sioux political organization, they found it convenient to deal with a tribe through a single leader and persuaded each tribe to choose a head chief. Even then, the head chief had to act as the tribal council instructed. The officials' assumption that a chief ruled absolutely over his people led to many misunderstandings between the two races. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail became big chiefs by white appointment. They held less authority during the 1870s than the whites thought, but far more than would have been possible in the old days, before the whites controlled the source of food.
The highest values of the Tetons centered on war. For a young man, success in battle offered the surest and quickest path to prestige, wealth, and high rank. A collection of enemy scalps was his badge of success, and together with the qualities of bravery, daring, and cleverness earned him the esteem of men and the admiration of women. Early in life he developed skill in horsemanship and in the use of combat equipment—bow and arrow, lance, tomahawk, knife, shield, and, when available, rifle. He joined a war society. Each tribe had several such organizations that gave expression to the ideals of warfare. Analogous to Akicita societies in civil matters, these military societies were not in themselves fighting organizations. A member wore into battle the distinctive insignia and regalia of his society, and at its feasts and dances he boasted of his prowess and achievements, but otherwise he enlisted in war parties as an individual. Each society sought the most renowned warriors, and the warriors in turn exerted themselves to bring honor to their societies.
Organization, departure, adventures, and return of a war party aroused universal interest among the tribe. Ideally, a raiding party numbered thirty to forty men. Its objectives were to steal as many ponies and take as many scalps as possible. Any warrior might recruit and lead such an expedition. Its existence was temporary and membership entirely voluntary. When a larger number of warriors or an entire band or tribe set forth on an invasion of enemy territory, a more elaborate organization went into effect. Officers called _blotaunka_ were appointed to assist the leader and regulate the march and attack. These men performed military duties similar to the civil duties of the Akicita. They served for one campaign only, but selection as a blotaunka was one of the highest military honors to which a warrior could aspire.
Women performed the vital if unheroic labor of cooking, preparing skins and robes, making clothing and lodgings, and moving camp. They also served an important function in lending inspiration to the men, for the admiration of a woman worked wonders in spurring hunter and warrior to ever loftier achievement. In sharp contrast to the boasting that trumpeted his return from war or the hunt, the Sioux man conducted his amorous pursuits with extreme shyness and circumspection. When he wanted to propose marriage, he deposited as much personal wealth as he could afford, usually in ponies, in front of the tepee of the girl's father. If the suitor was accepted, the girl moved in with him without further formality. No ceremonies or vows sanctified the contract. Divorce, while uncommon, was equally simple and accomplished without ceremony. Men of wealth often took several wives, housing them in one or more tepees. Both men and women displayed overwhelming and unconcealed affection for their children, imposing almost no discipline on them, and indulging every whim. Separation of parents from their children produced an emotional catastrophe and reunion a scene of joy.
For men and women alike, religion dominated nearly every thought and activity. It reflected their nomadic, outdoor life. Living close to nature, dependent upon its bounty for survival, the Tetons felt themselves part of nature, and nature an extension of themselves. A profusion of gods surrounded them, and one or more resided in every manifestation of nature. An early observer saw here "naught but an inextricable maze of gods, demons, spirits, beliefs and counter beliefs, earnest devotion and reckless skepticism, prayers, sacrifices, and sneers, winding and intermingling with one another, until a labyrinth of pantheism and skepticism results, and the Dakota, with all his infinity of deities appears a creature of irreligion."
Yet the Sioux was not a creature of irreligion, and a distinguished ethnologist did succeed in making some sense out of his gods. All gods merged to become Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious, who was at the same time many beings and one allinclusive being. Each of the constituent beings possessed distinct powers and commanded a peculiar form of ritual from those who would invoke his power; and all, while individual gods in their own right, collectively constituted Wakan Tanka. All the gods that made up Wakan Tanka were benevolent gods. The Teton did not worship them as the white man worshiped his God but rather appealed to them for help and personal power.
Of the benevolent gods, Wi, the Sun, ranked as chief. He appeared in material form each day to span the heavens, then rested at night in the underworld. Patron of the four principal Sioux virtues—bravery, fortitude, generosity, and fidelity—his power might be solicited through certain offerings and ceremonies. Chief among these was the Sun Dance, in which a dancer might communicate directly with Wi. Red symbolized Wi and stood forth as the great sacred color of the Plains Indians. Blue symbolized Skan, the Sky, who resided everywhere above the ground and could sit in judgment not only upon all humans but also upon all other gods. His immense potency, captured in a fetish (object endowed with supernatural power), prevailed in all matters. Only shamans might possess such a fetish, and it could be invested with the power of Skan only through lengthy and intricate ceremony. Maka, the Earth, was the mother of all material things and patroness of all that grew from the earth, of food and drink, and of the tepee. Fetishes made of anything grown from the soil might contain Maka's potency. Her symbolic color was green. Inyan, the Rock, was ancestor of all things and all gods. He was patron of authority and vengeance, construction and destruction, implements and utensils. Anything hard as stone might become a fetish with the powers of Inyan. His symbolic color was yellow.
Other gods, lacking the enormous power of Wi, Skan, Maka, and Inyan, performed no less essential functions. The Moon, for instance, set the time for the important events of mankind, while Tate, the Wind, governed the four seasons of the year. Wohpe presided over pleasure, protected the chastity of women, and mediated between gods, between men, and between gods and men. Tatanka, the Buffalo God, watched over the hunt and decreed its success or failure.
In addition to the benevolent gods that composed Wakan Tanka, the Sioux combated or propitiated seven malevolent gods, whose sole purpose was to make trouble for Indians. The Mini Watu, for example, looked and acted like maggots and could make things rot. They were eternally trying to enter the human body. When they succeeded, they caused an infinite variety of internal tortures and tried to drive Niya, the Ghost, from the body. Less evil were the Gica, who caused annoying accidents, and the Can Oti, who forever tried to confuse man in his recognition of directions and locations. Every misfortune that befell the Indian, whether calamitous or merely irritating, might be ascribed to the activities of these malevolent gods. Various techniques, such as the smoke of sage and sweet grass, could be employed to ward off some; the powers of the medicine man were required to repel others.
The encompassing presence of the Great Mysterious and the existence of his constituent parts in every expression of nature —earth, sky, sun, animals, birds, vegetation, rocks—conditioned the daily thought and behavior of the Tetons. At Standing Rock in 1911 Chased-by-Bears described to Frances Densmore how the Sioux felt about Wakan Tanka:
We talk to Wakantanka and are sure that he hears us, and yet it is hard to explain what we believe about this. It is the general belief of the Indians that after a man dies his spirit is somewhere on the earth or in the sky, we do not know exactly where, but we are sure that his spirit still lives. Sometimes people have agreed together that if it were found possible for spirits to speak to men, they would make themselves known to their friends after they died, but they never came to speak to us again, unless, perhaps, in our sleeping dreams. So it is with Wakantanka. We believe that he is everywhere, yet he is to us as the spirits of our dead friends, whose voices we cannot hear.
In the Teton gods resided all the different kinds of power that man needed on earth. To acquire the virtues of Teton society, to achieve success in war and the hunt, to win acclaim and status in the tribe, to enjoy satisfactory family relations, and to excel in the men's societies a Teton had to possess powers that could be obtained only from these deities.
The high point in the lifelong quest for power usually came to the man in adolescence and in fact marked his initiation to manhood. He went alone to the plains, stripped to a breechcloth, fasted, prayed, tortured himself, and humbly appealed for strength. If he experienced no vision after four days he returned home, but went again and again until the vision came. Interpreted by a shaman, it identified his guardian spirit for life. This patron being might dwell in any object, animate or inanimate, and between the youth and this object, or _totem_ , sprang a spiritual relationship that lasted for the rest of his life.
If the totem happened to be a rabbit, for example, the warrior took care always to treat rabbits with reverence, never to harm them, never to eat their flesh. Caricatures of rabbits adorned many of his possessions, especially his weapons, for in war above all pursuits the power of the totem was essential. He acquired some part of the rabbit—an ear, a leg bone, a tail—to symbolize the totem, and it became the repository of his personal power, the visible link between him and all rabbits, the most sacred and valued thing he owned.
Besides the symbol of his totem, the Sioux usually collected a number of fetishes, objects that a vision or dream had suggested as possessed of supernatural power. In return for prayer, sacrifice, feasts, and protection, the fetish promoted the welfare of the owner. Unlike the memento of his totem, the fetish might lose its power and thus its sacred character.
From gods, totems, and fetishes the Tetons derived every kind of psychological power needed to make them individually and nationally strong, confident, and untroubled. Without this power they would have been an inconsequential obstacle to the westward advance of the white man.
Indispensable to the proper functioning of the religion were shamans and medicine men. Although the distinction between the two is shadowy, the shaman held higher rank, possessed greater knowledge and power, and often taught the medicine man. To these men the Tetons looked for instruction and guidance in spiritual matters, for interpretation of visions and dreams, and for mediation between man and the gods. As Capt. John G. Bourke explained to his contemporaries in 1890:
The medicine-man of the American tribes is not the fraud and charlatan many people affect to consider him; he is, indeed, the repository of all the lore of the savage, the possessor of knowledge, not of the present world alone, but of the world to come as well. At any moment he can commune with the spirits of the departed; he can turn himself into an animal at will; all diseases are subject to his incantations; to him the enemy must yield on the war-path; without the potent aid of his drum and rattle and song no hunt is undertaken; from the cradle to the grave the destinies of the tribe are subject to his whim.
In addition to spiritual duties, shamans and medicine men took charge of attacking all maladies that home remedies had failed to cure. Malevolent gods caused sickness, and the medicine man attacked them with prayers, incantations, healing songs, and the personal fetishes on which he had made his reputation. He required advance payment, usually in ponies. Although his fees were exorbitant, he frequently returned them in case of failure. And failure often brought, in addition, physical harm or even death at the hands of the patient's relatives. The shamans and medicine men organized dream cult societies composed of members who had experienced similar dreams. As Captain Bourke pointed out, these men exercised such enormous influence that they virtually controlled the destinies of their people.
Although the Sioux had many ceremonies, dances, and feasts —some religious and others merely social—the Sun Dance was by far the most prominent and spectacular. Indeed, its importance in the total scheme of Teton life can hardly be overestimated. "The Sun Dance," Red Bird told Frances Densmore, "was our first and only religion."
The event took place each summer and lasted eight days. The first four days were devoted to a number of ceremonies that reinforced various ideals and customs of Sioux society. For the women, fertility and chastity found expression in rituals. For the men, there were rites to dramatize hunting, scouting, raiding, and victory over the enemy. The men's societies took in new members and staged a number of ceremonies. Feasts and give-aways alternated with the ceremonies. During the last four days men who had so vowed danced one of four grades of the Sun Dance—worshiping, supplicating, and communing with the chief god, Wi, the Sun. The fourth grade, danced on the fourth day, required the greatest self-torture. Suspended from the dance pole by rawhide thongs run beneath their chest and back muscles, often dragging buffalo skulls to increase the weight, the dancers gazed intently into the face of the sun and danced around the pole until the thongs tore through the flesh. Thus each man hoped to establish a direct relationship with Wi, and to gain Wi's power for himself and the tribe.
By accenting all the values of Teton culture, by exerting an enormous social and religious force on every individual, by strengthening the solidarity of the tribe, and by creating a sustained atmosphere charged with the most intense emotion, the Sun Dance occupied a place of incalculable importance in the life of the Teton Sioux.
This was the background that the Tetons brought with them to the reservation. This was the only life they had known and the only life they wanted to know. And this was the life that the white man, during the decade of the 1880s, set out to destroy, utterly and immediately.
## _3. THE NEW LIFE_
WATCHED by the soldiers at Camp Robinson, Red Cloud Agency sprawled on the banks of White River near the modern town of Chadron, Nebraska. Here in 1877 Red Cloud lived with his Oglala Sioux followers. At Spotted Tail Agency, on a tributary of White River about thirty miles to the northeast, stood the tepees of the Brulé followers of the chief for whom the agency had been named. Together with other Sioux at Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Agencies, on the Missouri River to the north, these Indians had lived under the eyes of government agents while their wilder kinsmen had made the last stand of the Sioux Nation. Under such leaders as Black Moon, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall, and Hump, these Indians had fought to assert their right to the Powder River hunting grounds. They had defied the United States Army to confine them to the reservation. On Rosebud Creek in June 1876 they stopped Brig. Gen. George Crook and forced him to turn back. On the Little Bighorn they battled Lt. Col. George A. Custer and the entire Seventh Cavalry Regiment, leaving the field strewn with the bodies of the commander and more than 200 soldiers. But these triumphs in the end brought defeat. Throughout the summer, autumn, and winter of 1876 growing hordes of soldiers hounded the Sioux so persistently that the agencies, with free rations, looked increasingly attractive. At noon on May 6, 1877, Camp Robinson and Red Cloud Agency formed the stage for a drama full of meaning for the future of the Sioux.
Led by Oglala tribal soldiers, a mass of Indians approached the military post. Crazy Horse, Little Big Man, Little Hawk, He Dog, Old Hawk, and Big Road, astride war ponies, rode abreast. Behind each came his personal following of warriors, riding in column formation. Women, children, and old men, with all the camp equipment, brought up the rear. Between 1,100 and 1,500 people, including about 300 warriors, made up a column that spread over two miles of prairie. Singing war songs, the van marched into the military quadrangle and drew up before General Crook and his staff. The Crazy Horse hostiles laid down their arms and promised to fight no more.
The surrender of Crazy Horse came as the grand climax of a series of similar scenes that had been enacted at Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Agencies throughout the spring of 1877. Pressed by soldiers in the north, one band after another had drifted in to give itself up. By summer, following the defeat of Lame Deer's Miniconjous by Col. Nelson A. Miles, nearly 4,500 hostiles had joined their tamer relatives at the two agencies. Only Sitting Bull and about 2,500 irreconcilables remained at large, and they had already sought refuge in the land of the "Great Mother," Queen Victoria's Canada. Some of Crazy Horse's people, angered by the death of their leader in a guardhouse scuffle at Camp Robinson, broke away once more and joined Sitting Bull in Canada. There, the Great Mother's redcoats turned out to be stern policemen, and the Great Father's bluecoats watched like hawks from the other side of a magic line on the prairie that the Sioux could not see. Food proved scarce and life grim. At the agencies, at least, their kinsmen ate with a degree of regularity. Finally, in July 1881, the Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse hostiles crossed the international boundary and surrendered at Fort Buford, Montana. Except for Sitting Bull, who spent the next two years confined at Fort Randall, these Indians were promptly placed on the reservation.
The Great Sioux Reservation in 1880 was bounded on the east by the Missouri River, on the south by the Nebraska line, on the north by the Cannonball River and the present line between North and South Dakota, and on the west by the eastern fringes of the Black Hills. The seven tribes of Teton Sioux held this reservation in common, but they were individually assigned to one of six separate agencies. Both Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Agencies, which lay within the state of Nebraska, had been abandoned in the autumn of 1877 and relocated the following spring inside the reservation. Red Cloud became Pine Ridge Agency and Spotted Tail became Rosebud Agency. On the west bank of the Missouri River, from north to south, were the Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and Lower Brulé Agencies. Across the Missouri from Lower Brulé lay the Crow Creek Agency.
Assigned to Pine Ridge were Red Cloud's Oglala Sioux, numbering about 7,300, and 500 Northern Cheyennes under Little Chief, who had successfully demanded to be returned to their northern homes from Indian Territory. At Rosebud, Spotted Tail's Upper Brulés totaled about 4,000. About 1,000 Lower Brulés lived at their agency and another 1,000 Lower Yanktonais were across the river at Crow Creek. Cheyenne River enrolled some 3,000 Miniconjou, Blackfeet, Sans Arc, and Two Kettle Sioux. About 1,700 Hunkpapa, Blackfeet, and Upper Yanktonai Sioux drew rations at Standing Rock Agency.
In all, about 8,000 hostile Sioux gave themselves up between 1876 and 1881. Perhaps another 8,000 remained at the agencies during the war of 1876. Of close to 16,000 Teton Sioux on the Great Sioux Reservation in 1880, few had been much changed by contact with the white race. Just arrived from the Powder and Bighorn country, the recent hostiles retained their aboriginal customs and attitudes almost unimpaired; and agency life had not seriously modified the native customs and attitudes of Red Cloud's Oglalas and Spotted Tail's Brulés. Throughout the 1870s the agents for these two tribes exercised little real authority over the chiefs. They handed out rations but otherwise existed at the sufferance of Red Cloud and Spotted Tail. Only a few bands, perhaps a thousand people, had lived so long near white neighbors that, much to the disgust of their kinsmen, they had begun to act like white men. The material culture of the Sioux had of course been conditioned by contacts with white traders and government officials, but, far from influencing really basic Indian values, the white and mixed-blood traders more often acquired Indian values themselves. The few Christian missionaries who had labored among the Tetons since the 1840s had made almost no headway. In 1880 the political, social, and religious structure of the Teton Sioux remained largely intact.
The year 1880 ushered in a decade of profound stress for the Tetons. No longer were they to have things their own way at the agencies. They might have weak agents—although at least three were men of strong will and determination—but always the Indians lived with the knowledge that the white soldiers were not far away. In the old days they could strike out for the Powder if they did not like conditions at the agencies. Now they knew such a course to be suicidal. No longer, as in the 1870s, was the Great Father's chief objective to control his troublesome wards and keep them from blocking the paths of westward expansion. Now, spurred by a growing number of Indian reform groups in the East, the Great Father sought also to "civilize" his Sioux children, to transform them at once into imitations of the prosperous, God-fearing tillers of the soil who peopled the land east of the Mississippi River. The attempt struck the Sioux with shattering impact.
When the hostile Sioux came to the reservation, they doubtless understood that the life of the future would differ from that of the past. Neither they nor those who had spent the war years at the agencies, however, could have had the remotest idea of the revolutionary changes in store for them. During the following decade, the white man cut the very heart out of the only life they knew. Resentful and suspicious, the old life fresh in their memories, they resisted, not altogether successfully, the substitute offered.
At once, they surrendered a large group of customs on which the old life had focused. Warfare was an activity no longer possible. Planning and conducting raids, performing attendant rituals, celebrating success, and mourning failure had once consumed much of the time, interest, and ambition of the Tetons. Now, except when men gathered to reminisce, it consumed none. The principal means of attaining prestige, wealth, and high rank vanished the moment they arrived at the agency. War societies ceased to play their vital role in Teton society and within a few years passed entirely out of existence.
The tribal economy promptly collapsed. The annual buffalo hunt was no more, not only because officials in Washington regarded it as barbaric but also for the very practical reason that buffalo were growing increasingly scarce. That the vanishing herds symbolized their own vanishing way of life cannot have escaped the Sioux. Another important method of winning recognition thus disappeared, together with traditional diet, clothing, lodgings, and many objects of material culture. When buffalo drifted onto the reservation in 1882, Agents James McLaughlin and Leonard Love let the Indians of Standing Rock and Cheyenne River organize a hunt. The joy with which they greeted this opportunity—their last, as it turned out—dramatizes the psychological impact of the end of their hunting days. In the first years they tried to recapture the excitement of the chase by killing issue cattle in the same manner as they had once killed buffalo. But the Sioux Commission of 1888 described this as "a disgrace to our civilization" that could only "perpetuate in a savage breast all the cruel and wicked propensities of his nature." Two years later the Indian Bureau prohibited the practice.
The ration and annuity system supplanted the hunt as the principal source of material needs. The Treaty of 1868, as amended by the Agreement of 1876, promised each Indian beef, bacon, flour, coffee, and clothing until such time as he could take care of himself. Although appropriations rarely provided the full amount guaranteed, and although the monotony of the fare did little to promote good health, the Sioux subsisted almost entirely on government dole throughout the 1880s.
The architects of Indian policy conceived the ration system as a bridge between savagery and civilization. At the end of the bridge the Indian would find 160 acres of land. By tilling his acres he would acquire dignity, frugality, individuality, and ultimately the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship. Once the bridge had been crossed, it could be destroyed. Zealous in their cause, reformers worked tirelessly for a law to break up the reservations and parcel out the land to individual Indians in the same manner that, at the same time, the public domain was being allotted to westward-moving homesteaders. This doctrine finally triumphed in 1887 with the passage of the General Allotment Act of Senator Henry L. Dawes.
Before the dream expressed by the Dawes Act could be made a reality, however, the Indian had to be taught to support himself. Thus the Sioux agents received instructions to break up the band camps, and to disperse the Indians over the reservation and encourage them to become farmers. The Indian Bureau furnished seeds, implements, and, finally, "practical farmers" to teach the nomadic huntsmen the arts of horticulture and husbandry.
Keeping the Sioux constantly upset, the program made little real progress. For one thing, the treaty guarantees killed incentive. The Sioux cheerfully admitted that they could not take farming seriously. "They do not wish to cultivate large fields or raise surplus crops," complained Agent McLaughlin, because "they might be dropped from the ration rolls and obliged to support themselves thereafter." This was, of course, precisely what the policy makers had in mind. Several times during the 1880s exasperated officials and reformers brought the Government perilously close, in the name of civilization, to repudiating the treaties.
There were other reasons, too, why the agricultural program moved slowly. Indians had never done this sort of demeaning labor before, and few could see any good reason for starting now. "An Indian's ambition does not run toward the plow and harrow," Agent V. T. McGillycuddy reminded his superiors, "but rather in the direction of prominence as a war chief or fighting man." He added that the Sioux considered themselves superior to the white man, who "is a laborer and pays tribute to the Sioux Nation by sending... rations and supplies of all kinds." Those who allowed the agent to prod them into the fields suffered the scorn of others less willing to surrender basic Indian values. As the years passed, however, more and more were induced to scatter over the reservation, build cabins, break a patch of sod, and plant just enough seed to keep the agent from hounding them. Even then, wanderlust usually triumphed. "An Indian will build for himself a log house, plow and fence a small track of land," observed Agent J. G. Wright of Rosebud. "At the expiration of the season, if not before, he will... go to or with his relatives to another locality, and do all the work again for another season." By the close of the decade, however, all but the most reactionary had established homesteads, whether permanent or transitory.
The land and the climate joined forces against the would-be Indian farmers. There were several good years, but in the latter part of the decade the Sioux watched the crops burn up and blow away, or disappear under clouds of grasshoppers, or turn into powder as hail beat down. The Sioux agents prefaced their annual report with generalities about what encouraging progress the Indians were making at farming, then detailed how, this year, the weather had caused the crops to fail. Years of bitter experience taught them some of the realities of dry-land farming in Dakota. White settlers learned the lesson at the same time, although later generations had to learn it all over again. Agent Charles E. McChesney of Cheyenne River flatly told the Indian Bureau in 1887: "The drawbacks to successful agriculture are so great as not to be overcome with any reasonable amount of labor," and warned that no success could be expected. But so strong in the East was the image of the self-sufficient Indian farmer dwelling happily on 160 acres of land that no dissenting voice could make itself heard.
Although the emphasis remained heavily upon agriculture, two other occupations held greater promise of leading some day to self-support. As the whites themselves learned, the Sioux country was far better suited for cattle raising than for farming. And as the agents learned, the Indian was much better fitted to the life of the cowboy than to that of the farmer. The Indian Bureau in 1879 distributed nearly 3,000 head of cattle among the Sioux agencies. To the surprise of many observers, the Indians took good care of them, rarely killing either the original stock or the increase. Although the herds grew yearly, and agents unanimously suggested that here lay the true road to self-support, sufficient breeding stock was never forthcoming. Then came the terrible winter of 1886–87, which ruined most of the cattlemen of the Northwest and decreed the end of the open range. It wiped out most of the gains made by the Sioux. Even so, Agent McLaughlin reported that his Indians had worked tirelessly all winter to save their herds, and while white cattlemen suffered losses up to 75 per cent, the Standing Rock Indians lost only 30 per cent. In later decades the Sioux fully justified the belief that their talents ran to stock raising, although the high beef prices of World War I lured them into selling their herds and plunging once more into poverty.
The other avocation that interested the Sioux was freighting. Rates charged by white contractors for hauling annuity goods from the Missouri River to the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Agencies proved so exorbitant that, in desperation, the Indian Bureau paid the Indians to haul their own goods. The experiment was an unqualified success, for the Indian could satisfy his roving inclinations and earn hard cash at the same time. He knew he had a good thing and never tampered with the freight entrusted to his care. When the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad pushed across northern Nebraska, the Indian freighters continued to haul supplies from the rail terminus to the agency. In 1884 the Pine Ridge Indians, operating 500 wagons, earned $40,000 hauling three million pounds of freight from Valentine to the agency. This same year they expanded the business by freighting 100,000 pounds of goods consigned to white merchants in the Black Hills.
Stock raising and freighting were but tiny rays of light in an otherwise dark picture. The old economic order had suddenly vanished, and the Sioux found themselves hurried toward an impossible alternative that they did not wish or intend to adopt. As a result, they complied only to the extent absolutely required and subsisted almost entirely on govenment handouts. By 1890 this enervating system, as the Sioux Commission of 1889 pointed out, had drained them of the "manliness and self-respect which characterized them in their savage state."
Although not so rapidly or effectively destroyed, the Teton political system experienced severe stress during the 1880s. Soon after the Sioux settled on the reservation, the Akicita societies, like the war societies, gradually quit holding meetings and finally disappeared. Their existence depended on the annual gathering of bands in tribal encampment and on the hunt. Many members discovered a compensating experience in the Indian police force, which now discharged the responsibilities of the Akicita. Other institutions whose meaning depended on the tribal circle, the Shirt Wearers, for example, likewise passed out of existence.
The institutions of chief and tribal council, however, persisted. For thirty years the white man had regarded the Teton tribes as an independent nation and had insisted upon dealing with each through a head chief. An institution that may not have existed before contact with the whites had assumed importance and authority to be reckoned with. Such chiefs as Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Sitting Bull clung tenaciously to the past and labored mightily to turn aside all threats to the old way of life. They were motivated not only by determination to preserve their own rank and power but also by sincere conviction that the welfare of their people demanded uncompromising devotion to time-tested values. Painfully aware that in the chiefs lay the most formidable barrier to civilization, the Government set out to strip them of their influence and break up the tribal relationship.
When officials of the Indian Bureau sent out instructions to tear down the chiefs, what they really meant was to tear down the chiefs who opposed civilization. Each tribe divided itself into factions labeled by the whites "progressive" and "nonprogressive." The progressives, for differing motives, tried to follow the path marked out by the agent. They clustered around their own leaders, some of whom were chiefs in their own right, and stood in opposition to the nonprogressive chiefs and their followers. As the progressive chiefs usually cooperated with the agent, they did not feel the pressures directed against the chieftainship. It was the rebellious ones who suffered the full weight of the Government's attack.
In the agent they encountered the first serious threat to their supremacy. Strong men like McGillycuddy and McLaughlin had many advantages in the struggle. They did not shrink from shutting off rations or employing the police to compel obedience. When confronted with an agent obviously determined to have his way or die in the attempt, the tribal councils invariably withdrew their support from a rebellious chief. They knew full well the inevitable consequence of violence—an agency swarming with bluecoats. Several times the clash of wills between Red Cloud and McGillycuddy brought Pine Ridge to the brink of revolt, but each time Red Cloud had to retreat. Weak agents, however, failed to control their agencies, and the chiefs for a time enjoyed their customary authority.
The chiefs rightly viewed the Indian police force as a menace to their supremacy. As Clark Wissler points out, police service called forth personal attributes cherished by Indian society and was one of the few white institutions that had enough in common with the old life to be a conspicuous success. Strong agents commanded respect and undivided loyalty from the policemen, who with few exceptions proved faithful to their trust and carried out assigned duties regardless of obstacles or opposition from their own people. For example, Red Cloud stood up to McGillycuddy and tried to prevent organization of a police force at Pine Ridge. McGillycuddy "deposed" him and recruited a highly efficient force captained by the able George Sword. At Rosebud, Spotted Tail captured control of the police from the ineffectual Cicero Newell but backed down when confronted with an agent, John Cook, who insisted on commanding the force himself.
In their control of the ration issue, agents discovered a powerful weapon to wield against the chiefs. The chief customarily received the entire issue of goods and distributed it among the people of his band. In 1880 McGillycuddy conceived an idea for taking this prerogative away from "these relics of barbarism." "Every man his own chief," he announced, and invited each family head who wished to draw his own rations. From eleven chiefs at Pine Ridge in 1879, he reported, this approach yielded twenty-five to thirty in 1880 and sixty-three in 1881. So successful was McGillycuddy's technique that it spread rapidly to the other agencies.
Complementing the new issue system in its effect upon the position of the chiefs was the farming program. As one family after another yielded to the agent's proddings and moved out on the reservation, the band camps dwindled. Removed from the daily guidance of the chief, no longer dependent upon his favor for their share of rations, family heads grew more independent, and the chief became correspondingly less influential.
With the weapons at its command, the Government probably could have destroyed the chieftainship by the end of the decade, although complete success might have produced worse demoralization than did partial success. The Government, however, found itself incapable of consistently following its own policy. The nonprogressive chiefs happened also to be the most powerful, and when matters arose that required Indian cooperation the first step was to convince these chiefs. At a time when Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were locked in a contest of wills with their agents, the Government provided each with a shiny black carriage and a large frame house, built within sight of the far less pretentious quarters of the agent. The chiefs were brought to Washington, lodged in a fine hotel, treated with respect by officials, lionized by the very reformers who demanded their destruction, and in all ways made to feel like foreign monarchs whose favor the United States was courting. On these occasions the voice behind the chieftainship—the tribal council—was ignored, and the chiefs were invested with greater authority than they really possessed.
Even the agents were inconsistent. Their attacks on the chieftainship were in fact personal attacks on nonprogressive chiefs. To accomplish anything they had to work either through real chiefs who happened also to be progressives or through progressives promoted to chieftainship by the agent. Thus McGillycuddy, archfoe of the chieftainship, controlled his agency through such men as Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses and American Horse. He later admitted frankly that these progressives held the balance of power at Pine Ridge, and that only through them was he able to hold out for seven years against the "mob element." McLaughlin, exercising firmer if less spectacular control of Standing Rock, was even more candid. "Although the Government no longer recognized the tribal authority of the chiefs," he wrote in his memoirs, "still it was easier to deal with one man of influence than to have to deal with many irresponsible ones." He dealt with Crow King, Gall, John Grass, Rain-in-the-Face, "and many others who were not chiefs originally but who were advanced as I found them influential and intelligent."
On the one hand, the Government reinforced the leadership of the chief and assumed for him an authority he did not and could not possess. On the other, it undermined his leadership by deposing him or refusing to recognize his rank. The Sioux were terribly confused. One moment the Great Father acted as if they should do the bidding of the chief; the next moment he seemed to want them to throw away the chief. This unstable situation also encouraged ambitious, discontented, or resentful men to intrigue against the established chiefs and to compete for the allegiance of the people and the favor of the agent. Men who would never have dared to criticize a chief in the old days suddenly began to plot the downfall of their leaders. The murder of Spotted Tail by Crow Dog in August 1881 can be traced directly to this sort of political maneuvering. With Spotted Tail out of the way, however, no man of comparable stature emerged, and the subsequent anarchy at Rosebud amply demonstrated that the Brulés as well as the whites owed a considerable debt to the statesmanship of Spotted Tail.
While the economic order crumbled and the political system buckled with the pressures of reservation life, the Government and religious denominations warred on long-established religious beliefs and social customs. In 1881 Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price voiced the guiding sentiment of the decade:
To domesticate and civilize wild Indians is a noble work, the accomplishment of which should be a crown of glory to any nation. But to allow them to drag along year after year, and generation after generation, in their old superstitions, laziness, and filth, when we have the power to elevate them in the scale of humanity, would be a lasting disgrace to our government.
The first step was to root out paganism. At the direction of Secretary of the Interior Henry M. Teller, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs on April 10, 1883, distributed a set of rules designed to stamp out "demoralizing and barbarous" customs. The directive defined a number of "Indian Offenses." It was an offense to hold feasts and dances, including the Sun Dance. It was an offense to have more than one wife. All practices of medicine men, medical and religious, were offenses. "Purchase" of wives by leaving property at the father's door was an offense. Willful destruction of property, the traditional way of showing grief over the death of a relative, was an offense.
Each agent received instructions to organize a Court of Indian Offenses charged with enforcing these rules. He was to choose three prominent Indians, preferably from the police, to serve without pay as judges. The courts were also empowered to exercise jurisdiction over misdemeanors committed by Indians, over civil suits involving Indians, and over violations of liquor regulations. Penalties at the command of the judges, subject to the agent's approval, were fines, imprisonment, hard labor, and withholding of rations. The Courts of Indian Offenses had no sanction in law, their sole justifications being inferred from the responsibility of administering Indian affairs. They finally achieved quasi-legal recognition in 1889 when Congress appropriated money for the salary of judges.
Among the Sioux the court did not turn out so happily as its originators had hoped. From Rosebud, Agent Wright pointed out that the offenses, in Indian eyes, were not offenses at all and that no Indian judge would have the courage to impose punishment for their violation. Dutifully, however, he appointed three judges; but when they discovered that no salary went with the job, they refused to serve, and no other Indian would accept the appointment. At Pine Ridge, McGillycuddy regarded the whole idea as nonsense. In place of the court, he encouraged the progressives to organize a "permanent board of councilmen," of which Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses was elected president. Although the agent reported delegating judicial responsibility to the council, there was never any doubt about who actually managed agency affairs. His successor, Hugh D. Gallagher, viewed the council as a "travesty upon justice." Grumbling that "plurality of wives was an indispensable condition of membership," he abolished the organization and thereafter dispensed justice himself. At Cheyenne River Agency, William A. Swan, thwarted by jealousy among the chiefs, deposed all chiefs and adopted a device patterned after McGillycuddy's council. Swan's successor, Charles E. McChesney, finally set up a court by permitting the Indians to elect the judges. Only at Standing Rock did the court work well. McLaughlin's judges took their jobs quite seriously and did not even shrink from hauling the mighty Sitting Bull before the bar of justice. Whether through the Court of Indian Offenses or through the Indian police, however, the agent constantly battled against the practices defined as Indian Offenses.
The practices of the medicine man were not quickly suppressed, for they could be conducted in privacy. But the new life assigned a less vital role to the medicine man, and his importance diminished. For one thing, with hunting and warfare gone, young men no longer sought personal power in a vision whose meaning depended upon the interpretation of the medicine man. One after another the medicine men died, without passing on their lore to apprentices.
The Sun Dance headed the evils regarded as antagonistic to progress. As soon as the list of Indian Offenses reached Agent Swan's desk in the spring of 1883, he made the Cheyenne River Indians call off plans for the annual Sun Dance. They protested, but he explained that the Great Father would be highly displeased and sternly warned that anyone who tried to organize a dance would wind up in the agency jail. To give point to the admonition, at Pierre's Bottom, where the Indians staged less sacred dances for whites from across the river, he tore down the dance house and seized the drums. McGillycuddy let his Indians hold a Sun Dance in 1883, the last anywhere on the Great Sioux Reservation.
With the proscription of the Sun Dance, the social and religious framework of the Sioux began to give way. No longer could they appeal directly to Wi for personal power and assistance. No longer could they experience the pervading sense of religious security that came only from the Sun Dance. No longer could the Sun Dance strengthen such values and institutions of Teton society as still existed. The Sioux had been dealt a shattering emotional blow, and their lives began to seem like a great void.
Missionaries tried to fill the void with Christianity. Since the days of Grant's Peace Policy, religious groups had intimately concerned themselves with Indian affairs. Now the Government encouraged missionaries of any denomination to go among the Indians and "assist in the great work of redeeming these benighted children of nature from the darkness of their superstition and ignorance," Episcopalians, Catholics, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians spread over the Great Sioux Reservation, establishing mission churches and schools. Under Bishop W. H. Hare the Episcopalians led the field, although the Catholics were not far behind. Even though they forever criticized good old Indian ways, the missionaries were kind, and the Sioux liked most of them well enough to attend services. They could not help noting with some confusion the different ways in which missionaries of different sects urged them to worship the same god, and the ill-concealed hostility that the various sects often displayed toward one another. But this was only one of many strange inconsistencies in the white man's behavior.
On the whole, the missionaries made good progress and enlisted many adherents. There were several reasons for this. The promise of a life in paradise after death proved a strong attraction. It corresponded to the Indian's earlier vague conception of a "happy hunting ground" and held out some hope of eventual relief from the unhappy reservation life. Christian rituals, especially those of the Catholics, provided a slight compensation for the loss of the old ceremonies. Moreover, the missionaries taught that everyone was equal in the eyes of God, and the church was about the only place on the reservation where the Indian found himself actually treated as an equal by white men.
The chief explanation for the willingness of the Sioux to embrace Christianity, however, lay in the multiple character of their old pantheon. One god more or less made little difference. In earlier times, they had appealed for personal power to the many deities that made up Wakan Tanka. Now, confronted with unmistakable evidence of the power of the white man, they logically turned to the white man's God for this brand of power. But they did so without giving up the old gods. Explaining the evolution of his own religious convictions, Capt. George Sword, head of the Pine Ridge police, also explained what had happened to many of his people:
When I believed the Oglala Wakan Tanka was right I served him with all my powers.... In war with the white people I found their Wakan Tanka the Superior. I then took the name of Sword and have served Wakan Tanka according to the white people's manner with all my power. I became the chief of the United States Indian police and held the office until there was no trouble between the Oglala and the white people. I joined the church and am a deacon in it and shall be until I die. I have done all I was able to do to persuade my people to live according to the teachings of the Christian ministers.
I still have my Wasicun [ceremonial pouch or bundle of a shaman] and I am afraid to offend it, because the spirit of an Oglala may go to the spirit land of the Lakota.
The schoolteacher went hand in hand with the missionary. Education was conceived as the most important step toward racial assimilation and national citizenship. The English language and the trades and arts formed only part of the teacher's program: he must also, by example, lift "the child of savage parentage" from "the degrading atmosphere of superstition and barbarism" that surrounded him from birth. Congress signified agreement by voting ever-larger appropriations for Indian education, and the Indian Bureau organized a special Education Division. Day schools and boarding schools multiplied on the reservation, some operated by the Government, others by religious groups either from their own resources or under government contract. Indian boarding schools sprang up off the reservation at Carlisle, Pennsylvania; Hampton, Virginia; Chilocco, Indian Territory; Genoa, Nebraska; Lawrence, Kansas; and Forest Grove, Oregon. Agents were authorized to compel attendance by such methods as withholding rations, and by 1887 there were 2,020 students enrolled in 117 boarding schools, and 2,500 in 110 day schools. Such progress moved the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1886 to call upon all officials "who come into contact with our red brothers to impress them with the great benefits thus conferred upon them, on which their hearts should swell with grateful emotion."
Capt. R. H. Pratt had just opened his famed Indian industrial school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, when the Tetons were consolidated on the Great Sioux Reservation. Although Indian parents displayed acute anguish at any parting from their children, in the autumn of 1879 Pratt managed to talk the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Sioux out of sixty boys and twenty-four girls. On a visit to the East during this winter, Spotted Tail looked in on the school and, angered by what he saw, stormed out with nine of his children. This blow, together with the death of several children from illness, played havoc with the reputation of Carlisle among the Sioux and made recruiting almost impossible for several years. Attendance at the off-reservation schools picked up, however, in the last years of the 1880s.
The off-reservation boarding school enjoyed greater qualitative success than any other educational method attempted, for it withdrew the child entirely from Indian influences and exposed him for several years entirely to white influences dosed with liberal applications of stern discipline. But even the officials of the Indian Bureau recognized a serious flaw in this apparent progress. Returned to the reservation, the graduates found themselves virtual aliens among their own people and with no occupation in which they could utilize their new-found skills and learning. Many Carlisle graduates turned up later, painted and draped in blankets, as active participants in the Ghost Dance.
Designed to bring education to the Indian, boarding schools were established at each agency, and day schools were started at population centers scattered around the reservation. Parents exhibited scarcely less reluctance to send their children to schools on the reservation than off. But the agents eternally pestered them to fill the schoolhouses; finally, with the authority of the Bureau, they shut off the rations of families that refused to cooperate. Trying to fill a 100-pupil boarding school at Standing Rock, McLaughlin assigned a quota to each band and stopped issue of rations to those who failed to meet their quota. Soon he had more applicants than he could accommodate and had to turn twenty-three away. "But I afterward learned," he revealed, "that there was not an _orphan child_ over five years of age left in the camps after this 'conscription.' " Although Indian welfare organizations, observing the increasing attendance at schools, marveled at the progress of education on the Great Sioux Reservation, Agent L. F. Spencer of Rosebud struck a more realistic note when he declared:
There are camps on this agency where the mere mention of a prospective school operates like a red flag on an outraged bull. Eliminate from the educational proposition sentiment and gush, and the average Indian of this agency who voluntarily sends his children to the government day-school does it either through fear of gastronomic consequences if he does not, or expects pay from the Great Father as a premium for surrendering his children for educational advantages.
The Sioux disliked the school not only because it separated them from their children but also because they quickly discovered that it was a place where children were subjected to a discipline unknown at home, and to types of work that no Sioux had ever done before. They must have dimly understood, too, that it represented the most dangerous of all attacks on basic Indian values, the one most likely to succeed in the end because it aimed at the children, who had known little if any of the old life.
The first day of school at Pine Ridge forcefully dramatized this truth. A crowd of parents, curious and anxious, clustered around the big frame schoolhouse. The children disappeared inside, and a teacher drew the window blinds. But a breeze blew one aside, and a father caught a glimpse of what was going on. One matron held a boy while another sheared his long braided hair, symbol of Sioux manhood. Instantly the mob stormed the school and rescued the children. Only time and infinite diplomacy enabled it to reopen.
By the last years of the 1880s, the Sioux had been forced to surrender their children to the demands of education. The effect was to heighten the resentment of the adults and to confront the children, exposed to both Indian and white environment, with seriously conflicting values.
The Government and the religious groups had evolved a program of breath-taking scope for making over the Indian and, in their optimism, looked forward to reaching the goal in an impossibly short time. Had they aimed for success in 100 years instead of 10, they would still have needed a corps of agency officials of the most exceptional caliber. Simply to manage a large agency and do nothing but maintain tranquillity demanded abilities that few men possessed, for as Bishop Hare remarked, "Indian life is a tangle of intrigue and diverse parties and clashing plans and interests through which the benevolent, no matter how clever, may find it hard to make his way." To also transform several thousand primitives into copies of the typical white citizen clearly demanded agency officials with an enormous range of skills.
The spoils system of appointment did well to produce an agent who could uphold his authority. With each change of administration, virtually every Indian official from Secretary of the Interior and Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the lowest agency employee gave way to a replacement appointed mainly for political reasons. When Grover Cleveland led the Democrats to power in 1885, after twenty-four lean years on the outside, more than fifty of the fifty-eight Indian agents surrendered their jobs to Democrats. Although the Indian Service contained some dedicated and capable people, they were the exception. Carl Schurz observed as late as 1894: "A thoroughly competent, honest, and devoted Indian agent is, according to my experience, so rare a jewel that, were I at the head of the Interior Department [he once was], nothing could induce me to part with him." Herbert Welsh, Secretary of the Indian Rights Association, told of a state governor who laughingly admitted that for party workers fit for nothing else, he usually found jobs in the Indian Service. An Indian inspector reported finding an "abandoned woman" running an Indian school, a lunatic in charge of another.
The Indian reform organizations performed notable service by publicizing the often disastrous, always damaging consequences of the spoils system. Toward the end of the decade they made some progress. The Indian Rights Association took credit for influencing President Benjamin Harrison to appoint Thomas J. Morgan as Indian Commissioner in 1889. An ex-Baptist preacher of the staunchest rectitude, Morgan justified the faith of the reformers not only by translating their ideas as fully as possible into policy but also by working assiduously to extend the merit system over large blocks of jobs. Throughout the 1880s, however, corruption, incompetence, and short tenure burdened the conduct of Indian affairs.
The spoils system dealt less severely with the Sioux in the 1880s than with many tribes. James McLaughlin brought intelligence, fairness, judgment, and authority to Standing Rock, and he enjoyed a smooth channel of communication to his people through his Indian wife. He won the respect of reformers, Army officers, Indian officials, and most of the tribal leaders of his agency. The powerful political support of the Roman Catholic Church ensured a long tenure. For all his blustering theatrics, McGillycuddy made a good agent, and there were many who said that the troubles of 1890 would never have got out of hand if he had not been removed in 1886 to make way for a deserving Democrat. James G. Wright at Rosebud and Charles E. McChesney at Cheyenne River also proved superior to the usual appointees. But there were enough agents like the weak Cicero Newell and the corrupt L. F. Spencer to cancel out the McLaughlins and add the weight of mismanagement to the immense burdens already borne by the Sioux.
By the end of the decade these burdens had plunged the Sioux to depths of despair unprecedented in their history. Virtually every meaningful custom had been attacked or proscribed, every institution damaged or destroyed. That they could not avoid adopting some of the alien customs and institutions thrust upon them only intensified their grief over the loss of the old. A pervasive feeling of bitterness, helplessness, and futility gripped the Sioux.
## _4. THE LAND AGREEMENT_
THE TETONS had signed many treaties with the United States, and each surrendered more land. The first was in 1851. The great covered-wagon migrations of the 1840s, followed by the acquisition of Oregon and California by the United States, suggested the desirability of clearing the Indian tribes from the Platte Valley route to the Pacific. After a lavish distribution of presents near Fort Laramie in 1851, the Tetons and other tribes of the northern Plains set their marks to the treaty. After 1851 these tribes continued to roam from the Upper Missouri to the Arkansas, for the treaty granted this right. But for the first time, they had a homeland assigned to them. The territory of the Tetons was enclosed by the Heart, Missouri, White, and North Platte Rivers, and the Black Hills.
A block of treaties with the tame bands along the Missouri River in 1865 foreshadowed the second fundamental document defining Teton-white relations. On its face, the Treaty of 1868 appeared an abject white surrender to Red Cloud's demand, reinforced by two years of successful warfare, to abandon the Bozeman Trail, which ran through the Powder River country to the Montana gold fields. But the goal of civilizing the Indians had begun to form in the minds of Eastern humanitarians, and the Treaty of 1868 laid the groundwork for the effort. True, the Government gave up the Bozeman Trail forts and guaranteed the Powder River country as unceded hunting grounds. But the treaty also drew new boundaries around the Sioux homeland, and in subsequent years these took on far more meaning than the empty guarantee of the Powder River country. The present borders of South Dakota west of the Missouri River enclosed the Great Sioux Reservation, and, although few of the chiefs understood it, they had agreed to settle within the reservation. Many, including Red Cloud himself, set the pattern. Lured by free rations and annuities, they established themselves at the newly built agencies. Settling the Indians in one place was the first step toward launching the civilization program.
The third important document was called an "agreement" because the House of Representatives, angry at the Senate's exclusive role in the ratification of treaties, had brought about the destruction of the Indian treaty system in 1871. In 1875 the Government ordered the Sioux to vacate the Powder River hunting grounds and withdraw to the Great Sioux Reservation, and it fought the war of 1876 to enforce the order. At the same time, gold having been discovered in the Black Hills, government commissioners set forth to reduce the Great Sioux Reservation by purchasing the rich Hills. Impelled by more promises of rations and annuities together with some thinly veiled intimidation, the chiefs who were not fighting bluecoats on the Powder signed the Agreement of 1876 and thus gave up the triangle of land formed by the forks of the Cheyenne River.
In none of the treaty councils were the chiefs fully informed of the contents of the documents they were asked to sign. Treaty commissioners made much of the rations and other gifts that were promised but said little if anything about the land and freedom the Indians would be expected to surrender. This they were left to discover later. Repeatedly victimized, it is not surprising that the Sioux brought to all subsequent councils a profound distrust of the white man, together with an imperfect knowledge of the actual provisions of the treaties and agreements that regulated their relations with the Government.
By 1880 eastern Dakota had filled with settlers. Railroads had reached the Missouri River and stopped. The Great Sioux Reservation denied more than 43,000 square miles to settlement and economic exploitation and cut off the Black Hills from the rest of the territory. Settlers demanded that the Indian move aside. In Congress, Delegate Richard F. Pettigrew sponsored a bill to provide for a commission to go to Dakota to learn if the Sioux cared to cede about half the Great Sioux Reservation to the United States and accept in return clear title to six separate reservations. The bill slipped through as a rider to the sundry civil appropriations bill in August 1882.
Secretary of the Interior Henry M. Teller, a westerner thoroughly in sympathy with Pettigrew's aims, named Newton Edmunds to head the commission. A former governor of Dakota Territory and a master at negotiating with Indians, Edmunds went beyond the intent of the law—instead of merely sounding out the Sioux on the proposal, he set forth to secure their assent. He brought intense pressure to bear, made much of the many advantages to the Indians, and barely mentioned that he was asking them to part with half their remaining land. They grew dizzy under the avalanche of words. At each agency the chiefs held out as long as they could, but someone always started a stampede and they lined up to sign. Edmunds returned to Washington early in 1883 and announced that the Sioux had accepted the agreement.
The Indians protested that they had been victimized, and they had. The document bore only the signatures of 384 chiefs and headmen—not the three-fourths of all adult males required by the Treaty of 1868. The Indian rights organizations went into action, and Congress sent the agreement back to the reservation for the necessary signatures. The Indians would not sign, and it failed to gain Congressional approval. Again the Sioux had seen confirmed the conviction that the whites could not be trusted. No matter how purely motivated, any future attempt to reduce the Great Sioux Reservation would at once encounter the legacy of the Edmunds Commission.
In the General Allotment Act of. 1887, sponsored and championed in the Senate by Senator Henry L. Dawes, the advocates of opening the Sioux Reservation had at last a legal framework for achieving their purpose. Allotment in severalty had been incorporated into a number of treaties and had been tried among a few tribes. The Dawes Act, with a few exceptions, applied the principle to the remaining Indians. Each family head would receive upon application a patent for 160 acres of land, others for less in varying amounts. The United States would hold the patents in trust for twenty-five years. With the patent went citizenship in the state or territory of residence. When all Indians on a particular reservation had accepted allotments, or sooner if the President decided, the United States might negotiate with the tribe for its surplus land, which would then be thrown open to settlement under the Homestead Laws.
REDUCTION OF THE GREAT SIOUX RESERVATION 1868 to 1890
Reformers hailed the dawn of a new era and confidently looked to the Dawes Act as a cure for all ills afflicting the Indian. The Dakota promoters, for different reasons, also greeted the law with enthusiasm. Within a year they had hurried through Congress a bill applying its provisions to the Great Sioux Reservation. The Sioux Act of 1888, however, reversed the order of procedure laid down by the Dawes Act. It called for negotiations for surplus land before surveys had been run and allotments made to the Indians.
The Great Sioux Reservation contained nearly twice the land needed for allotments. The plan was to set aside six separate reservations—Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, Crow Creek, and Lower Brulé—on which the allotment program could be carried out at a leisurely pace. The surplus land, about nine million acres, would be purchased from the Sioux at fifty cents an acre, restored to the public domain, and immediately thrown open to settlement under the Homestead Laws. In return for surrendering their right to "joint undivided occupancy" of the Great Sioux Reservation, the Indians would receive a number of benefits. They would have clear title to their land instead of mere right of occupancy. Proceeds from the sale of the surplus land to settlers, after reimbursing the Government for expenses incurred by the Act, would go into a permanent Sioux fund whose interest, at five per cent, would be spent on educational programs. Also, the Government promised to continue for another twenty years the educational benefits of the Treaty of 1868, to furnish the Sioux with up to 25,000 cows and 1,000 bulls, and to give to each family head and single adult who took land in severalty two milk cows, a pair of oxen, farming tools, a two-year supply of seeds for five acres, and twenty dollars in cash. In keeping with the Treaty of 1868, the Act could not take effect until three-fourths of all adult males had agreed to its provisions.
The commission appointed to obtain these signatures consisted of Capt. Richard H. Pratt, Reverend William J. Cleveland, and Judge John V. Wright of Tennessee. Pratt seemed an admirable choice for chairman. As head of the Carlisle Indian School, he had worked closely with Indians for a decade. It did not follow, however, that he was trusted and revered by the Indians. On the contrary, insofar as the Sioux remembered him at all, he was the stern officer with the big nose who had taken their children to a far-off place from which some never returned. They had no great love for the man who was expected to convince them that the land agreement was a good thing.
As Pratt was to find out, the Sioux had already made up their minds. Delegations from each agency had gathered at Rosebud to agree upon a united stand. Ignorant of the forces that shaped their destiny, the Sioux failed to see that the combination of reformer and land boomer inevitably meant the end of the Great Sioux Reservation. All they knew was that another commission was coming to talk them out of their land. Judging from past experience, the commissioners would talk long and convincingly. They would make many appealing promises that would later, if they materialized at all, somehow get twisted into considerably less attractive shape. Their big mistake in dealing with the Edmunds Commission, the delegates decided, lay in arguing at all. This time they would put forward leaders to say no, then turn a deaf ear to all further talk.
The commission started at Standing Rock Agency in July 1888. Agent McLaughlin regarded the terms of the act as unfair. Although he had to cooperate with the commissioners, the Indians knew where his sympathies lay. They stood firm. Pratt began by having his assistants pass out copies of the act, but the Hunkpapas and Yanktonais suspiciously refused to touch the paper. Pratt next launched his presentation. He explained that "no character of threat, menace or force was to be used to induce them to assent; that it was a matter which was to be left to their own free will." He then hinted darkly that failure to sign the agreement would make "further action which may be taken in regard to the reservation problematical and uncertain". (Commission Report, p. 5) Thereafter, explicitly or implicitly, threat and menace formed the basis of his argument.
Day after day for nearly a month, the Standing Rock people listened with polite dignity as Pratt explained the act, section by section, over and over. Forgetting their compact of silence, they put forward John Grass and three others to speak. The chiefs declared that the Government could not be expected to honor these promises any more than it had past promises. Besides, the Sioux did not have more land than they and their children would need. Even if they did sell, half the land was unfit for farming and could not be sold to settlers. It seemed all wrong, moreover, that the Government would offer the Indians fifty cents an acre, then sell it for $1.25 an acre. For each argument Pratt had a convincing reply, but the Sioux refused to be convinced.
Finally, Pratt asked the Standing Rock Indians to step forward and sign. The law required each Indian to signify acceptance or rejection by signing one of two papers. This was something new and aroused deep suspicion. Although twenty-two Indians placed their marks on the agreement, the rest bluntly declined to sign either paper and marched out of the council hall to return to their homes.
Soundly defeated at Standing Rock, the commissioners boarded a steamer on August 21 and sailed down the Missouri to Crow Creek and Lower Brulé. At both agencies a sizable group of progessives stood ready to sign, but the proposal excited much heated opposition, too. At Lower Brulé, where 244 made their marks on the agreement, old Iron Nation led his following out of the council. At Crow Creek 120 signed, but 282 refused to sign either acceptance or rejection.
Even if Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Cheyenne River voted overwhelmingly for the agreement, Pratt still lacked the necessary three-fourths majority. And all the news from these agencies indicated even more stubborn opposition than that encountered at Standing Rock. He hastened to a council of war with Secretary of the Interior William F. Vilas, who was vacationing at Madison, Wisconsin. Back at Lower Brulé, Pratt summoned the Sioux agents and the leading men of each tribe to convene there for a council on September 22.
The delegates, 150 in all, stood united in opposition to all of Pratt's persuasion and threats. But there were also signs of weakening. The chiefs made much of the absurdly low price offered for their land, thus implying that a higher price might be acceptable. They also thought they saw an opportunity for a trip to Washington—the Sioux chiefs immensely enjoyed such excursions—and suggested that maybe a talk with the Honorable Secretary of the Interior or the Great Father himself would produce a compromise. Pratt ridiculed the idea that Congress would even think of raising the price and categorically declared that a trip to Washington was out of the question.
Their mission a total failure, the commissioners went home to write a scathing denunciation of the Sioux and their obstinate refusal to recognize something so clearly in their best interest. The report ended by suggesting that the Government put the agreement into effect without their consent.
The Government was not ready for such drastic action. In October the chiefs got their trip to Washington. Sixty-one heard the Secretary of the Interior offer to recommend to Congress some liberal changes in the agreement, including one dollar an acre for their land. A majority of the delegation, forty-seven in number, turned in a report holding out for $1.25 and even more generous concessions. They had had their vacation in Washington and now were beginning to think that maybe a compromise was not possible after all. In truth, the Interior Department had been cleverly maneuvered into paying sixty-one railway fares and a large hotel bill without receiving much in return.
Supporters of the program drew up another bill, far more generous than its predecessor, and closed ranks for another try. In the national elections of 1888, the Republicans, led by Benjamin Harrison, turned out the Democrats; but if anything they were even more committed to breaking up the Great Sioux Reservation, for Dakota stood overwhelmingly in the Republican camp. Added impetus came in February 1889 with passage of the Omnibus Bill, which provided for admission to statehood in November 1889 of North and South Dakota together with Washington and Montana. Congress enacted two measures for opening the Sioux land. One, part of the Indian Appropriation Act signed on March 2, 1889, empowered the President to appoint another commission to negotiate the best agreement possible and submit it to Congress for ratification or rejection. The other, the Sioux Act of March 2, 1889, spelled out new terms of an agreement that the Indians must either accept or reject as a whole. Although the commission was appointed under the first act, it was instructed to present the second act to the Sioux. Only if they turned down this new proposal was the commission to negotiate.
The Sioux Act of 1889 embodied a number of concessions which its supporters hoped would break down some of the opposition. Most important, it raised the price to be paid the Indians for the ceded land. On the assumption that settlers would claim the best land first, the Sioux were to be paid $1.25 an acre for all land homesteaded by whites during the first three years, seventy-five cents an acre for land sold in the next two years, and fifty cents an acre for all remaining land. Rather than deduct the expense of administering the program from the proceeds of land sales, as contemplated by the Act of 1888, the United States now offered to bear the entire cost. The prospect of having to take their land in severalty had greatly upset the Indians. The Act of 1889 specified that the allotment program could not be started on a reservation until favored by a majority of adult males, and then family heads would receive 320 instead of 160 acres plus the benefits promised by the Act of 1888, except that fifty dollars instead of twenty dollars would be spent for physical improvements on the property of each allottee. Finally, to meet an unrelated complaint, the act appropriated $28,500 to compensate the followers of Red Cloud and Red Leaf for ponies seized by the Army during the war of 1876.
As chairman of the Sioux Commission, President Harrison appointed Charles Foster, former governor of Ohio. William Warner of Missouri, another prominent Republican and national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, also received an appointment. Both were able men but had no experience with Indians. The third member of the commission was the one who was expected to sell the proposition to the Indians: Maj. Gen. George Crook knew Indians as well as any white man in the country. The Sioux knew him, too, for they had fought his soldiers and surrendered to him back in the 1870s. How far they shared the prevailing white belief that Crook was the best friend they ever had is less apparent. They probably accorded him more trust than they did most whites. But the undeniable fact remained that, in uniform or out, General Crook revived unpleasant memories.
Again the Sioux agreed among themselves to resist all blandishments and, come what may, to withhold their marks from the agreement. At each agency the people chose several chiefs to do all the talking and to say that they had decided to reject the agreement. But this year they were not dealing with a Captain Pratt. Crook knew how to handle Indians. The commissioners acted as if they had all the time in the world. Great feasts were staged to put the Sioux in a contented frame of mind, and dancing, banned since 1883 as an Indian Offense, once more enlivened the agencies. In council, the commissioners displayed infinite patience and good will. They professed complete indifference to whether the Sioux accepted the act or not. Their mission was simply to explain it and record the vote.
Nevertheless, the "threat and menace" that characterized the proceedings of 1888 dominated the councils of 1889, although more subtly. Crook, Foster, and Warner clearly saw what would happen if this agreement failed. They and the agents knew that the Sioux would have to give up their land, and probably with considerably less compensation than provided by the agreement. The welfare of the Sioux demanded acceptance, and the commissioners recognized the urgency of securing a favorable vote. As Bishop Hare remarked, the commission, "convinced that the bill was essential, carried persuasion to the verge of intimidation. I do not blame them if they sometimes did. The wit and patience of an angel would fail often in such a task."
Crook did not mince words. There can be little doubt of his sincerity when he laid the unpleasant facts squarely before the Sioux:
Last year when you refused to accept the bill Congress came very near opening this reservation anyhow. It is certain that you will never get any better terms than are offered in this bill, and the chances are that you will not get so good. And it strikes me that instead of your complaining of the past, you had better provide for the future.... It strikes me that you are in the position of a person who had his effects in the bed of a dry stream when there was a flood coming down, and instead of finding fault with the Creator for sending it down, you should try and save what you can. And that when you can't get what you like best you had better take what is the best for you. [Commission Report, p. 172.]
He also heaped scorn upon them, as when he told the Rosebud Indians:
When I left you before I expected much good of you, and here after eleven years I come back and find that you have done but very little towards civilization. You have been contented to sit down and eat rations, thinking the Government is always going to keep you.... This indolent life you have been living has made squaws of you, and if you don't work and help yourselves you will get such a bad record that the Government will have to send out dolls and rattles to amuse you. [p. 50.]
The Sioux had many anxieties—some well grounded, others illogical. The 181 pages of fine print that make up the transcript of council proceedings are heavily laden with childish complaints of real or imagined grievances. The record also yields significant clues to the temper of the Sioux and the motives for their opposition. It reveals, first, a deeply rooted suspicion of any proposal from the Government. The Indians searched for deception in every clause of the agreement and every utterance of the commissioners. At Rosebud, after ex-Governor Foster had finished reading the agreement, Swift Bear insisted that he have for his own use the copy that had been read, and no other. At Standing Rock, John Grass requested that the Indians be permitted to have their own stenographer to record what was said.
Beyond the suspicion, the record reveals a paralyzing fear. The Sioux feared the incomprehensible. Acres, principal and interest, and invisible boundary lines had little real meaning to them. And they feared the unknown. Their present situation, bad as it was, seemed preferable to one that, even though endlessly explained by the commission, remained beyond their ability to comprehend.
In the councils at each agency, the greatest confusion and anxiety sprang from the conviction that the agreement would kill the Treaty of 1868, whose benefits had been extended by the Agreement of 1876. Over and over the commissioners emphasized that one would not affect the other, that the two would run side by side until the Treaty of 1868 died. The Sioux could not grasp such a relationship. At Pine Ridge, Old-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses waved a copy of the treaty and declared, "When this paper was given to me at the treaty of 1868, the commissioners at that time told me that I would have to wait for the time called for, and then I would have a right to make another treaty.... It seems you are in a great hurry," he concluded. "The time when we will sign again will be twenty-one years" (p. 79).
The complicated system of pricing the surplus land badly disturbed the Indians. No one could predict how many settlers would establish homesteads during the first three or even five years. What prevented the white man from waiting five years and then taking all the land at fifty cents an acre? The commissioners could not say how much would be paid in total for the ceded territory. Here, surely, was evidence that the Great Council in Washington had set a clever trap. "Now, my friend," one chief addressed General Crook at Cheyenne River, "there is nothing on a foundation at all. Everything is just wobbling. Even you yourselves don't know the price we are going to get for anything. So even you don't know, and I don't know, and I am afraid of that." And, added another chief, "Suppose we go to work and sign this bill now. They would take that bill there and keep it there until it comes to 50¢ an acre, and that is what don't suit us" (p. 169).
The matter of compensating the Red Cloud and Red Leaf people for their confiscated ponies sparked considerable discussion among all but the beneficiaries. Those of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Indians who had remained at peace in 1876 pointed out that they, too, had lost ponies. The only difference was that they had voluntarily surrendered theirs as an earnest of good faith, while those of Red Cloud and Red Leaf had been seized to prevent a threatened flight to the hostile country. Crook knew that this was so, but all he could do was to promise to tell the Great Father about the injustice.
And what about their rations, the Sioux asked. It was no secret to them that the Government wanted to make them self-supporting and do away with rations altogether. Again and again the commissioners explained that the Agreement of 1876 guaranteed rations until the Sioux could support themselves, and the land agreement had nothing to do with that. But many Indians could not shake the haunting fear that once they had given up their land the food supply would be shut off.
At first glance it seems incredible that the Sioux, as the transcript clearly shows, could be so united in opposition to the agreement, yet approve it by an overwhelming majority of 4,463 out of 5,678 eligible to vote. The answer lies in the expert way in which General Crook guided the commission to its goal. The technique was to bury the Indians under mountains of words while working behind the scenes to lure individuals away from the influence of the chiefs. If a considerable stampede could be started, even the most determined opponent, afraid of being excluded from the benefits, would rush to sign. With the help of the agents and the half-breed squaw men, who could read the newspapers and recognized the truth of Crook's warning, this is precisely what happened. In its report to the Secretary of the Interior, the commission candidly described the method:
It was soon discovered that it was impossible to deal with the Indians as a body in general councils. The matter had been already decided as the result of their tribal councils, and that when all were present each one sustained the other in the opposition to which each had pledged himself. It was therefore determined to endeavor to convince individuals that substantial advantages to the Indians as a whole would result from an acceptance of the bill. For a time the task seemed almost hopeless, but persistence prevailed and interest was awakened. As soon as the question became debatable the situation changed and success was assured, [p. 21]
Even so, there were some exciting moments. At Cheyenne River on July 18, Chasing Crow led the first contingent of defectors forward to sign. Pandemonium broke loose and two painted warriors rushed to the table brandishing war clubs. Indian policemen seized them. Amid shouts and "great commotion," the signing continued. Similar disturbances, engineered by the reactionary Hump, chief of police, hampered subsequent signings. Crook spoke gruffly and summoned Maj. George M. Randall from nearby Fort Bennett to sit in on the proceedings. The blue uniform spoke more eloquently than words, and the troublemakers took the hint. Later, even Hump signed. Less serious trouble erupted at Rosebud and Pine Ridge. At Standing Rock, Sitting Bull tried to break up the signing but failed.
With more than the necessary signatures, the commissioners boarded a train for Chicago. They left behind at each agency a divided people. Progressive and nonprogressive emerged more sharply defined than ever, and each faction harbored the bitterest resentment toward the other. Those who had refused to sign blamed not only the Sioux Commission but also their tribesmen who had weakened and voted for the agreement. The contention spread even to the reservation day schools, where fist fights and worse among the children revealed the depth of the cleavage among the parents.
Intense argument exploded over the matter of rations. Fear that the Government would cut rations once it obtained the Sioux land had cropped up repeatedly in councils with the commissioners. They had promised over and over that acceptance of the agreement could in no way influence the amount of food issued, and they emphasized this in their report: "Without our assurances... it would have been Impossible to have secured [the Sioux] consent" (p. 23). Nevertheless, the ever-suspicious nonprogessives predicted a reduction in rations now that the Government had their land. Certain that even the white man could not be that stupid, the progressives just as assuredly ridiculed the idea.
The nonprogressives pointed out that they were already being counted. A census agent, A. T. Lea, had started work on the Rosebud Reservation before the Crook Commission arrived. Since the days of the old Red Cloud Agency, nothing excited such fury as a census. Many Sioux suspected that Lea's presence had something to do with rations. It did. Congress had insisted that the Indian Bureau find out if rations were being issued to nonexistent Indians. As a matter of fact, the Sioux for years had used various clever devices to inflate their numbers. If any ever worried over the ethics of the practice, they could console themselves that shrinkage of beef on the hoof between delivery and slaughter often ran as high as thirty per cent, surely more than compensating for the overcount. It would take Lea two years to finish the census, and therefore no immediate ration cut could be expected as a result of his labors. Still, his very presence heightened the agitation over food that the land sale had started.
The progressives and nonprogressives did not have long to argue. The commissioners had been gone hardly two weeks when the order came: reduce the beef issue at Rosebud by two million pounds, at Pine Ridge by one million, and at the other agencies by proportional amounts. By the same Indian Appropriation Act under which the Sioux Commission was appointed, Congress in an economy move had cut the appropriation for subsistence and civilization of the Sioux for the fiscal year 1890 to $900,000— $100,000 less than for the two previous years. The new Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Thomas J. Morgan, had no choice but to cut rations.
The Sioux Commission had not lied. The land agreement had nothing to do with the quantity of rations. But this was a subtlty that the Sioux could hardly be expected to appreciate. They understood only one thing: the Government had tricked them again. "When it became generally known that the reduction was really going to be made," reported Agent Hugh Gallagher from Pine Ridge, "it caused intense feeling against the Sioux Commission among those who had signed the bill. They were made the targets for derision by the non-signers, who called them fools and dupes and told them they were now getting their pay in the same coin that had been received before whenever they were so foolish as to make contracts with the whites."
Greatly upset by the beef reduction (Foster dashed off a sharp note of protest to Commissioner Morgan on August 29), the Sioux Commission won approval to bring a delegation of chiefs to Washington. There, perhaps the Indians could be shown why their rations had been slashed, and at the same time high officials could be impressed with the gravity of the action. Moreover, the commissioners had said they would try to win for the Sioux certain concessions not covered by the agreement. Although they had stressed that these were not promises, the Sioux had regarded them as such. It therefore seemed wise to make certain not only that everyone concerned agreed on what these benefits were but also that the high officials appreciated the degree to which the honor of the Government had been committed. The Indian delegates, happy at vacationing in Washington once again, showed up at the Interior Department on December 18, 1889. They talked Secretary John W. Noble to the verge of exasperation, then repaired to the White House for a short session with the President himself.
The chiefs returned to their homes somewhat happier because the report of the commissioners, submitted to the Secretary of the Interior the day before Christmas, clearly stated that the Sioux had signed only because they trusted the commission to secure for them a long list of additional benefits. Many of these—employment of Indians at agencies where possible, equality of mixed bloods with full bloods, construction of gristmills, removal of the ban on "innocent dances"—lay within the administrative province of the Secretary of the Interior, who agreed to most of them. But the really important ones required Congressional action. Among them were increased educational appropriations, prompt availability of interest on the three million dollar permanent fund, legislation for apportioning the permanent fund and its interest among the new reservations according to population, an appropriation to compensate the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Indians for ponies seized in 1876, and, above all, an appropriation of $100,000 to restore the cut in the beef allowance.
Although the hope born of the council with the Great Father gladdened the Sioux a bit, it was still a bad winter on the reservation. There was hunger and perhaps even some starvation. With reduced rations and the failure of their own crops, the Sioux found it hard indeed to keep the family kettle full enough. There was sickness. Epidemics of measles, influenza, and whooping cough swept the camps with fatal effect. At Pine Ridge alone the death rate rose to 45 a month in a population of 5,550.
Then came the cruelest blow of all. On February 10, 1890, President Harrison announced acceptance of the land agreement by the required three-fourths majority of adult males and threw open the ceded territory to settlement. The promises had not been carried out. No surveys had been made to determine the precise boundaries of the new reservations. No provision had been made for Indians living in the ceded land to take allotments there. Here was the ultimate in bad faith.
A group of townsite boomers tried to stake claims on the Lower Brulé land but were prevented by troops hastened from Fort Randall. Otherwise, the expected rush failed to materialize: the bad years had dramatized the hazards of farming in the Dakotas. For the Sioux this was a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it undoubtedly saved them from swarms of landhungry whites who would have shown scant regard for Indian rights. On the other, it reinforced their apprehension that they might receive only fifty cents or seventy-five cents an acre for the ceded land. The price of $1.25 held for only three years.
In issuing the proclamation before fulfilling the promises of the Sioux Commission, President Harrison had acted on the recommendation of Secretary of the Interior Noble. Transmitting the commission's report on January 30, Noble had declared:
In my own judgment, the act should now be proclaimed, the surveys made as soon as possible, and the Secretary of the Interior required, so far as he may, without further legislation, to carry into effect the recommendations of the Commission; and the further recommendations of the Commission be transmitted to Congress for action by it in accordance with the spirit and fair understanding of the negotiations exhibited to have taken place between the Commission and the Sioux.
It may be relied upon, I think, that the legislative branch of the Government will execute what it believes to have been this understanding with the Indians, in good faith. The burdens assumed are light in comparison with the benefits obtained [nine million acres of land], and there will be no substantial reason for refusing to supplement the act assented to by such further provisions as are recommended to make it fair and acceptable.
The President sent the report to Congress on February 10, together with the draft of a bill incorporating all the recommendations of the commission, and urged that the legislation be enacted at once.
As February, then March, then April slipped by, the awful realization dawned upon the Sioux that the Great Council in Washington, having got their land, had no intention of making good the promises of the Crook Commission. The general had died in March 1890, a bad omen. Said Red Cloud to Father F. M. Craft, missionary at Pine Ridge, "Then General Crook came; he, at least, had never lied to us. His words gave our people hope. He died. Then hope died again. Despair came again."
The Senate, traditionally liberal and humanitarian in dealing with the Indian problem, passed the bill on April 26. But the House of Representatives held the purse strings and declined to untie them. Not only this but the House also delayed passage of the regular Indian Appropriation Act for fiscal year 1891 until August 19, 1890, too late for clothing and other annuity goods to reach the agencies until winter was well advanced. And the act carried only $950,000 for subsistence and civilization of the Sioux, still $50,000 short of the amount required for the full ration allowance.
On the Sioux Reservation an old Indian, with singular appropriateness, remarked to Reverend William J. Cleveland: "They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land and they took it."
## _5. THE INDIAN MESSIAH_
THE LAND AGREEMENT shook the Teton tribes with more violence that anything in their history, and it threw into sharp focus all the resentments and frustrations built up in a decade of reservation life. The winter of 1889–90—with unrelieved hunger, disastrous epidemics, the opening of the ceded lands, and the continued inaction of Congress on the recommendations of the Crook Commission—emptied the Tetons of hope.
Then, in March 1890, eleven Indians returned to Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Cheyenne River from a long journey to the west. They told a wonderful tale. A Messiah had appeared on earth. He preached a new religion. It was a religion that offered hope for the Indian race—hope not dependent upon promises of the white men. He held forth a vision of paradise in which not only the Sioux but all Indians would at last be free of the white burden and reside for eternity in a blissful land. By simply believing in the Messiah, practicing the tenets of his faith, and dancing a prescribed "Ghost Dance," they could bring forth a new world where everything was even better than it used to be.
The first vague rumors of the Messiah had begun to circulate among the Sioux eight months earlier. On July 23, 1889, a young schoolteacher named Elaine Goodale, accompanying a party of Oglalas on an antelope hunt in hope of gaining insight into the Sioux mind, wrote in her diary:
So tired I fall asleep before supper. Later in the night a cry is raised: "A traveler comes!" Chasing Crane, on his way home from Rosebud, is welcomed with supper and a smoke. God, he says, has appeared to the Crows! In the midst of a council he came from nowhere and announced himself as the Savior who came upon earth once and was killed by the white men. He had been grieved by the crying of parents for their dead children, and would let the sky down upon the earth and destroy the disobedient. He was beautiful to look upon, and bore paint as a sign of power. Men and women listen to this curious tale with apparent credence. A vapor bath is arranged, and I fall asleep again to the monotonous rise and fall of the accompanying songs.
The tale reached the Sioux Reservation while the Crook Commission was making the rounds of the agencies and just before the ration cut. With the white man causing them so much grief, the Tetons were much interested in the vague reports of a God who had come to earth to rescue the Indians from adversity. In the autumn of 1889 the Oglalas of Pine Ridge convened a council to talk over the rumors. Red Cloud and Little Wound (nonprogressives) and American Horse and Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses (progressives) presided. They chose representatives to journey westward in search of the truth. Similar councils at Rosebud and Cheyenne River also selected emissaries. In all, there were eleven and they traveled together. From Pine Ridge went Good Thunder, Yellow Breast, Flat Iron, Broken Arm, Cloud Horse, Yellow Knife, Elk Horn, and Kicks Back. Short Bull and Mash-the-Kettle represented Rosebud, and Kicking Bear represented Cheyenne River. Of these men, Short Bull and Kicking Bear were to become the most ardent disciples of the new religion among the Tetons.
Kicking Bear was about forty-one years old, a mystic with a modest reputation as a medicine man. In the old days he had been a mighty warrior and an intimate of Crazy Horse. He had taken many ponies in raids on the Crows and other enemy tribes and had distinguished himself in 1876 at the Rosebud, Little Bighorn, and Slim Buttes. By birth an Oglala, he became a Miniconjou band chief through marriage to Woodpecker Woman, niece of the Miniconjou chief, Big Foot. Uncompromising hatred of the white man and all his ways, refusal to adjust to the new life, mystical leanings, and rank and reputation made Kicking Bear a natural leader in the quest for the old life.
Short Bull, Kicking Bear's brother-in-law, was a medicine man in Lip's Wazhaza band on Pass Creek. Three or four years older than Kicking Bear, Short Bull had also been a notable warrior and, after the surrender, had become a leading nonprogressive. A sharp-faced man of small stature, he was kind, generous, and well liked—traits that Agent James G. Wright mistook for lack of force and influence. Short Bull's career as a Ghost Dance leader amply demonstrated his qualities of leadership.
The Teton delegation journeyed first to Wind River Reservation, Wyoming. Here they found that other tribes had dispatched emissaries to search for the prophet. Five Shoshonis, three Northern Cheyennes, and an Arapaho from Oklahoma joined the Sioux. At Fort Hall Agency, Idaho, five Bannocks and Western Shoshonis joined the party. Southward to Salt Lake City the pilgrims made their way, then traveled by train to western Nevada. Some Paiutes furnished them with wagons, in which they drove to the Paiute Reservation at Walker Lake, south of the Central Pacific Railroad. Here dwelt the Indian Messiah.
He was a Paiute sheepherder named Wovoka, and his rise had been spectacular. On January 1, 1889, only a year earlier, he had been an obscure shaman. On this day an eclipse of the sun was visible in the western states, and Wovoka experienced a wonderful vision. He "went to heaven and saw God and all the people who died a long time ago." When he came back to Nevada from heaven, he came as the Messiah of the Indian race. He came with a new religion and with a mandate from God to rescue his people from the darkness that awaited them.
Such a miracle was nothing new to Mason Valley. Wovoka's father, Tavibo, had created similar excitement among the Paiutes about 1870 and had even attracted some interest among the neighboring Bannock and Shoshoni tribes. From his father, Wovoka had acquired a degree of mysticism that contributed, nearly twenty years later, to the vision that led to his own notoriety. From his father, also, Wovoka had learned sleight-of-hand and other tricks of the magician's art that made up part of the stock in trade of every successful medicine man.
After the death of Tavibo, Wovoka went to live with David Wilson, a white rancher in Mason Valley. Adopted by the family and named Jack Wilson, Wovoka came under Christian influences. The Wilsons read aloud the family Bible, and Wovoka learned about the white man's God and about his son, Jesus. He learned that Jesus was a great medicine man who could heal the sick and control the elements, and he noted how the whites had killed Jesus by nailing him to a cross. These stories deeply marked the youthful mind of the future prophet.
In addition to conventional Christian teachings absorbed from the Wilsons, Wovoka encountered another brand of Christianity. By 1890 Mormon families had spread out in all directions from the Great Salt Lake Valley, and many had settled in Nevada. In the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Indians occupied a place of special significance, and Mormons took special interest in them. Wovoka was exposed to Mormon teachings but rejected them. Nevertheless, they were almost certainly among the factors that shaped his mind.
Another influence went into the making of this prophet. For two years he worked in the hop fields of California, Oregon, and Washington. On Puget Sound he learned of the Shaker religion, which since about 1880 had swept the tribes of the region. This religion reflected the influences to which its founder, a Squaxon Indian named John Slocum, had been subjected. It was a strange combination of Catholic pageantry, Presbyterian austerity, and pagan witchcraft. Significantly, trances formed an important part of its ceremonies. Despite the efforts of the agents to suppress it, the Shaker religion held powerful sway over the tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Wovoka learned the doctrine, participated in some of its rituals, and observed its regenerating effect upon converts.
Back in Mason Valley, Wovoka, now about thirty-five and an intelligent, handsome Indian, became in the late 1880s a successful shaman, moderately wealthy and respected by his people. He longed for more. Gambling his reputation on a spectacular stratagem, he publicly vowed to cause ice to float down Walker River in midsummer. With numerous witnesses, he did. From that day forward, the Paiutes revered him as one of the great shamans of all time. What they never knew was that the Wilson boys, to help their adopted brother advance in his chosen profession, had filled a wagon with blocks of ice from the Wilson ice house and surreptitiously dumped them in the river above the place appointed by Wovoka as the scene of his miracle.
Wovoka prayed for still greater things. His motivation was more than personal ambition. Like most other Indians in 1889, he was bewildered and tormented. The customs, beliefs, and values of the white people had crushed the old Indian life. Traditional views of the universe seemed no longer valid. Yet the white man's views of the universe were not satisfactory either. In groping for basic explanations, in longing to roll back the years, Wovoka differed from few of his race. But he had the determination coupled with the ability to do something about the conflict.
"When the sun died" on January 1, 1889, the Paiutes were filled with fear. They shouted, wailed, and fired guns into the air trying to drive off the evil monster that threatened to devour the sun, most powerful of Indian deities. Wovoka lay ill with fever on a pallet in his tule wickiup. A vision came to him. He died and went to heaven, where he spoke with God. God was very much like the God described in David Wilson's Bible, and heaven was a heaven such as the white man conceived. Yet at the same time it was a heaven inhabited by Indians—all the Indians who had once lived on earth. They enjoyed peace, happiness, and prosperity. No one grew old, and everyone remained free of sickness and want. Here in short was the old life made infinitely better.
God told Wovoka to take a message back to earth. If the Indian people followed His commandments, as preached by Wovoka, they might join their ancestors in heaven and enjoy the Utopia Wovoka had seen. To bring about this millennium, they must be industrious, honest, virtuous, peaceful. In fact, although not stated, they must follow a code of conduct almost identical to the white man's Ten Commandments. The admonition against fighting was stressed. This was indeed a revolutionary doctrine to a people whose highest values were based on success in war. In addition to adopting these moral precepts, Indians must perform at stated intervals a dance that God taught Wovoka. It was this "Ghost Dance" that became the most spectacular and widely known feature of the religion.
Finally, as evidence of his divine mission, God gave Wovoka command of the elements. By exercising this power, he could make the sun shine or make the heavens drop rain or snow. With a mandate to assume command in the West, while leaving the East to "Governor Harrison," Wovoka returned to earth and began to preach to his people.
The following summer he staged an impressive demonstration of his supernatural power. The captain of the Indian police, Josephus, came to Wovoka and told him that the crops were dying and that unless it rained soon there would be much suffering in Mason Valley. Wovoka said: "You can go home and on the morning of the third day you and all the people will have water." Josephus spread word among both Indians and whites that the drought would soon end. Rain began to fall at once, and by the third day the Walker River had overflowed its banks. Like most medicine men, Wovoka was doubtless an extraordinarily skilled weather forecaster, but from then on few Paiutes doubted his story of the journey to heaven.
The Paiutes became devoted adherents of the Ghost Dance religion, and Wovoka organized dances in Mason Valley and at Pyramid Lake, to the north. Word of the new Messiah soon reached nearly every reservation in the West; paradoxically, innovations of white civilization spread the news faster and farther than could have been possible in the old days. Indians now communicated by mail with members of distant tribes simply by getting a friend who had been to school to write a letter in the English language. Railroads now blanketed the West, and the trainmen made little effort to prevent Indians from riding the cars. Traveling by railroad to other reservations had become a favorite pastime, and the teachings of the prophet were spread orally from one reservation to another. Thus the Sioux had learned of the religion by word of mouth from the Shoshonis and by letter from tribes all over the West.
The Sioux emissaries and their companions reached Mason Valley early in 1890. They were not the only Indians who had come. Representatives of many of the important tribes of the Plains and mountains had converged on Walker Lake at the same time early in the year. Agent C. C. Warner counted thirty-four delegates, and there were doubtless more. They were the vanguard of the procession that in the next several years would travel to Mason Valley.
Agent Warner, who administered the two Paiute agencies from headquarters at Pyramid Lake, attached little importance to this unusual gathering of Indians. He did not report the arrival of emissaries from other tribes until nearly a year later, and then only because the Indian Bureau, confronted with open warfare among the Sioux, was frantically trying to find out what had started the whole thing. As late as October 1891 he wrote that he could furnish little information on the Ghost Dance religion because he was "pursuing the course with [Wovoka] of nonattention or a silent ignoring."
The delegation that included the Sioux probably stayed in Mason Valley about a week. They reverently paid homage to the great medicine man, listened to his sermons, and learned the movements of the Ghost Dance. The message they heard was truly revolutionary. Deeply rooted in Christianity, it demanded attitudes and practices leading inevitably to progress in civilization, and as a stimulus to such progress it was worth a thousand reform policies devised in New England drawing rooms. This truth, however, escaped the architects of Indian policy, who regarded the Ghost Dance religion as a monster of paganism that would stamp out the progress of a decade. There was reason for their misunderstanding, for the doctrine underwent many changes as it spread out from the source. Each tribe shaped the religion to the framework of its own mythology, and each individual adherent added further embellishments of his own. The white friends of the Indian had, after all, to base their judgments on distorted fragments of the doctrine that came from many different sources.
Yet the few perceptive whites who took the trouble to investigate learned the truth of the matter. One such, Capt. Hugh L. Scott, wrote his superiors that Wovoka "has given these people a better religion than they ever had before, taught them precepts which, if faithfully carried out, will bring them into better accord with their white neighbors, and has prepared the way for their final Christianization." Another was the Smithsonian Institution's able ethnologist James Mooney. In 1891, while the religion still gripped the tribes, he went west and, by means of specialized training and a sympathetic approach, learned all any white man possibly could about it. He won an interview with Wovoka himself and thus obtained the true version of the doctrine. Later he verified Wovoka's statements by interviewing Ghost Dancers throughout the West.
According to Mooney's findings, Wovoka promised his followers to regenerate the earth. He declared that a new world was being prepared for the Indian race. It was already advancing from the west and was expected to arrive in the spring of 1891. The ground would tremble as a signal for Indians everywhere to fix in their hair sacred feathers by which to soar aloft while the new land covered the old. The new land would push the white people before it, back across the ocean to where they came from in the first place. When the cataclysm subsided, the Indians would lower themselves from the sky. Here they would find all Indians who had once lived on earth—friends, relatives, and ancestors. Together they would enjoy eternal life, unmarred by pain, sickness, discomfort, want, or death. On every side, deer, antelope, and elk would roam in abundance, and herds of buffalo such as only the old people could recall would once more blacken the prairie.
By praying, dancing the Ghost Dance, and singing the Ghost Dance songs, Indians could "die" and journey to this paradise for brief visits before it actually appeared. Wovoka taught the delegates the mechanics of the dance and the words of some songs. By dancing, singing, and praying, they worked themselves into emotional frenzies. They went into trances that enabled each to "die" for a short time and to see what the future held in store for the Indian race.
But there was a price for this. The religion imposed a rigid moral code, grounded in Christian ethics and departing radically from ancient attitudes and habits. "Do no harm to anyone. You must not fight," Wovoka enjoined the disciples. A people who had fought for centuries, who loved to fight, whose greatest aspirations centered on war and whose greatest rewards sprang from war, were told to put away all weapons and trophies of war, to think gentle thoughts, and to harm no person, red or white. "Do not tell lies." "When your friends die, you must not cry." Since all dead Indians were to return, there was no need to cry, to mutilate and torture their bodies, to cut off their hair, and to destroy property. And finally, a blanket injunction to cover all else, "Do right always."
Yet, as powerfully as Christianity influenced the Ghost Dance religion, there were features, such as the dance itself, that evoked the old pagan religion; and the object of the whole movement, of course, was the restoration of the old savage life and its dominant values. Christianity and paganism had united to form the common denominator of a doctrine that offered grounds for belief to all Indians, progressive and nonprogressive alike. Such a combination appealed strongly to the heart and mind of the American Indians of 1890.
Throughout the history of the world, such a combination has appealed to other peoples similarly afflicted. The Ghost Dance religion was by no means unique; on the contrary, it bore striking resemblances to earlier primitive religious movements. Wovoka was but one of a long line of aboriginal mystics who sought to rid their people of an alien oppressor and lead them into the promised land. By such teachings the Tewa medicine man Pope united the Pueblos of the Rio Grande to expel the Spaniards in 1680. The Ottawa chief Pontiac used a like doctrine to forge the confederation that in 1763 nearly drove the English from the Appalachian frontier. Early in the nineteenth century Tecumseh and his religious ally, the Prophet, built a similar confederation that wrought destruction in the Old Northwest until shattered at the battle of Tippecanoe. In 1881 the Apache medicine man Nakaidoklini stirred up the White Mountain Apaches with such teachings, and as late as 1887 the prophet Sword Bearer excited the Crows with promises of an approaching millennium.
Nor were the antecedents of the Ghost Dance confined to American aborigines. Condorcanqui, who united the Peruvian natives against the Spanish in 1781, and the Mahdi of Allah, who inflamed the tribes of the Sudan against the British and seized Khartoum in 1885, are but two of many native leaders elsewhere on the globe who preached tenets that would have been familiar to Wovoka.
Mooney himself saw the Ghost Dance in its larger context— and not just a phenomenon of primitive peoples. Any race that has been crushed as were the American Indians, he observed, is likely to turn to a self-appointed redeemer. "Hope becomes a faith and the faith becomes the creed of priests and prophets, until the hero is a god and the dream a religion, looking to some great miracle of nature for its culmination and accomplishment. The doctrines of the Hindu avatar, the Hebrew Messiah, the Christian millennium, and the Hesunanin of the Indian Ghost dance are essentially the same, and have their origin in a hope and longing common to all humanity."
Broken Arm, Elk Horn, and Kicks Back left their comrades at Walker Lake and visited some tribes in the Pacific Northwest. The rest of the apostles turned homeward, the Sioux reaching their agencies in March 1890. At Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Cheyenne River they told the wonderful story. The Messiah had indeed come to earth to save his Indian children. He had scars on his hands and feet, evidence of treatment many centuries ago by the white men. There was other proof of divinity: Once as they watched he made two birds talk to each other; another time he caused two horses to do the same. During the journey home they had come upon a herd of buffalo, by 1890 a rarity on the plains. The Sioux remembered the Messiah's words: "On the way home, if you kill any buffalo, cut [off] the head, the tail, and four feet, and leave them, and that buffalo will come to live again." They killed one of the animals and, after devouring the carcass, left the useless parts enumerated by Wovoka on the prairie. Before their eyes the buffalo came to life and ambled away. Also on the return trip, still a long way from home, they grew weary. Calling upon the Messiah for help, they went to sleep one night and next morning awoke to find themselves much closer to their destination.
The delegates related how the prophet had given them a graphic preview of the world to be gained by embracing his religion. "We looked and we saw a land created across the ocean, on which all the nations of Indians were coming home." (This phrase, "nations of Indians coming home," found its way into the lyrics of numerous Ghost Dance songs.) In this land they visited friends long dead. Chasing Hawk, recently deceased, and his wife, killed in war many moons before, lived in a large tepee of buffalo skin. (The Sioux now lived in dark log cabins; on ration day at the agency they camped in cheap canvas tepees.) Good Thunder saw his son, who also had died in battle long before, and talked with him in his tepee. But the delegates were permitted only a brief glimpse of this land, the Messiah explaining that "it was not time for that to take place."
The apostles added to Wovoka's message a touch of their own —a tragic one as it turned out. The doctrine as taught by the Paiute prophet was entirely pacifistic. Indians need only follow his moral precepts and dance the Ghost Dance to bring about the new order. Above all, he stressed the importance of avoiding violence, even in thought. Every other tribe absorbed this commandment, but not the Sioux. The bitterness engendered by the land agreement and the ration cut left them with too much hatred toward the white man. As described by the Sioux emissaries, the doctrine of peace became a doctrine, if not of war, at least of vicious antagonism to the whites.
The contrast between the story told to his people by Porcupine, the Northern Cheyenne delegate from Tongue River, and that told by the Sioux is instructive. Porcupine's recollection of Wovoka's description of his crucifixion and return displays no particular hostility toward the white man. The Messiah said that "after God made the earth the people were afraid of me and treated me badly. This is what they done to me." He exhibited the scars on his hands and feet. "I did not try to defend myself; I found my people were bad, and so went back to heaven and left them." Now God had sent him back to "renew everything as it used to be and make it better." The Sioux version of the same story took on decidedly militant overtones. "The white people are not good," said the Messiah. "They killed me, and you can see the marks of my wounds." But now he came as a savior of the Indians, and the whites could not harm him. If soldiers tried to arrest him, he would, merely by raising his arms, "knock them into nothingness." Or he would cause the earth to "open and swallow them in."
Porcupine enjoined the Cheyennes: Wovoka "told us not to quarrel or fight or strike each other, nor shoot one another; that the whites and the Indians were to be all one people." The Sioux proclaimed that the Messiah, as punishment for three centuries of oppressing the red race, would wipe the white race from the earth. The whites "have treated the Indians very bad all the way through," ran the Sioux story, and the Messiah is "going to exterminate the whites by some phenomenon in the spring of 1891." Thus the whites were not to be gently pushed aside, but violently and vengefully destroyed. And a time, the spring of 1891, had been set. From this idea, it was for some only a short mental leap to the belief that force would help prepare for the day of deliverance. William T. Selwyn, mixed-blood postmaster at Pine Ridge, asked a Ghost Dancer "if their father advises them to cause trouble on the whites by next spring." "That was the orders they had from their father," was the reply, "but [the orders] will be kept secret."
The story of the apostles sped to the remotest corner of each of the newly created reservations. Everyone talked of the new religion, but not everyone believed. The progressives, mostly the young who had known little of the old life, found the tale hard to swallow. Yet they were too much Indian to dismiss it lightly, and only a few of the more courageous spoke up in ridicule. The nonprogressives, largely those of middle and advanced age who had suffered most from the conflict between new and old values, had few doubts. The glowing promises gave them new hope, and they looked eagerly to the apostles for instruction in the Ghost Dance.
At Rosebud, Short Bull and Mash-the-Kettle began holding councils as soon as they returned in March 1890. Agent J. George Wright immediately saw that something was amiss. Although newly appointed, he was not without experience. His father had been agent at Rosebud from 1882 to 1886, and he himself had served L. F. Spencer as clerk from 1886 to 1889. Wright owed his appointment to the Crook Commission. General Crook suggested to the Secretary of the Interior that Spencer's love of graft and strong drink impaired his usefulness as agent, and he recommended Wright as successor. The new administration had just begun to purge the Indian Service of political undesirables, and Crook's advice opportunely provided an excuse to get rid of Democrat Spencer. Although mild mannered, Wright in his quiet way made a good agent. When he learned of Short Bull's councils, he sent policemen to sit in on a few and report what was agitating the Brulés and disrupting the farming program. Then he called Short Bull into his office and lectured him with unaccustomed sternness. Meekly, the medicine man promised to stop holding councils, and there is no evidence that he failed to keep his promise.
Pine Ridge required more firmness. Here a Democrat, Hugh D. Gallagher, still clung to his post, although the Republican ax was soon to fall. An elderly politician from Indiana, he had served satisfactorily and enjoyed a quiet tenure. In April, Postmaster Selwyn told Gallagher about the religious excitement that was sweeping the reservation and reported that Good Thunder and his colleagues had called a council to inaugurate the Ghost Dance. Gallagher summoned Good Thunder and two others and quizzed them about the matter. They refused to talk, so he locked them in jail. After two days, although they still declined to answer the agent's questions, they promised to hold no more councils and were released. Here, as at Rosebud, the apostles either quit preaching or else continued in secret.
At Cheyenne River, Charles E. McChesney, soon to give up his post to a Republican, considered the new religion so unimportant that he did not interfere with Kicking Bear's agitation. He knew something of the doctrine but expected nothing to come of it. Kicking Bear and his followers wrote letters to the other agencies summoning all Sioux to a grand council at Cheyenne River to receive instruction in the Ghost Dance. But after Gallagher and Wright intervened, the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Sioux gave up the idea of attending, and the excitement subsided at Cheyenne River too. Kicking Bear went off to visit the Arapahoes in Wyoming.
The Indians of Standing Rock, Crow Creek, and Lower Brulé undoubtedly heard of the coming millennium, but the news created no great enthusiasm. None of the tribes at these agencies had sent representatives to Nevada, and none of the delegates from the other agencies had as yet attempted to introduce the dance among them.
The Sioux agents had failed to take the Ghost Dance religion seriously, and none had received any hint of its militant trappings. They did not report the talk of a Messiah until queried by their superiors. Garbled rumors reached Washington early in June 1890. A Sioux youth attending the Presbyterian college at Pierre, South Dakota, received a letter from relatives at Pine Ridge advising him that there might be an uprising soon. He told a white friend, a resident of Pierre named Charles L. Hyde, who on May 29 wrote to the Secretary of the Interior that "the Sioux or a portion of them are secretly planning and arranging for an outbreak in the near future." The Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Robert V. Belt, promptly called for a report from each of the Sioux agents.
Gallagher and McChesney acknowledged that a religious excitement was current among the Sioux but minimized its importance. It would die out, they believed, when the Messiah failed to appear at the appointed time. Wright set the unrest down to dissatisfied nonprogressives. At Standing Rock, James McLaughlin, of all agents the best informed about doings on his reservation, had heard nothing of the Messiah and detected nothing unusual among his people.
The replies of all the agents leave little doubt that the Sioux had no thought of going to war. Clearly, the doctrine preached by the apostles had not in June 1890 won the implicit faith of large numbers of Sioux, and nowhere had the Ghost Dance itself been formally inaugurated. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that had Congress at this time restored the ration cut and carried out the promises of the Crook Commission, the Ghost Dance religion would have quietly run its course as it did among the other tribes affected by Wovoka's teachings. But Congress had other matters to debate more weighty than Indian appropriations. And the summer of 1890 only multiplied the miseries that beset the Sioux.
Hunger continued to stalk the reservations. Bishop Hare estimated that rations, even when carefully husbanded, lasted only two-thirds of the period for which they were issued. An officer stationed at Fort Niobrara, thirty-eight miles southeast of Rosebud Agency, recalled that throughout the summer Brulé families trooped down from the agency to beg at the fort. Regulations authorized the post commissary officer to issue food to visiting Indians. They took advantage of this, then went to beg for the garbage of the company kitchens and the refuse of the slaughter pens. Citizens of nearby Valentine told similar stories.
But there was also reason for hope. The farming season began auspiciously. A heartening number of Indians planted seeds, and heavy spring rains got them off to a good start. (This may partly explain why the agents had been able to suppress the Ghost Dance religion so easily.) Then in mid-July scorching winds whipped across the prairie. Day after day they pounded the crops relentlessly. Elaine Goodale, journeying from the Black Hills to the Missouri and north to the Cannonball inspecting Indian schools, recalled the scene: "The pitiful little gardens curled up and died in the persistent hot winds. Even young men displayed gaunt limbs and lack-luster faces. Old folks lost their hold on life, and heart-broken mothers mourned the last of a series of dead babies." In many areas oats, wheat, vegetables, and even the range grass were totally destroyed. Elsewhere a third to a half of the crops managed to survive. In neighboring Nebraska and eastern South Dakota, settlers abandoned their homesteads by the score. The Sioux had no place to go. The disaster this year exceeded that of previous years, for now they desperately needed the food. That they had permitted themselves hope in June only magnified the impact of the disaster in August.
Other grievances piled on top of hunger. The new boundary between Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations, running due south from the mouth of Black Pipe Creek, upset Chief Lip's Wazhazhas, who lived along this creek and Pass Creek, to the east. Technically Brulés, these people had joined the Oglalas in 1854 and lived with them until 1876, when they rejoined Spotted Tail's Brulés to avoid the trouble with the Army that Red Cloud's leadership gave promise of provoking. Although they had drawn their rations at Rosebud Agency, their ties with the Oglalas were still strong, and, when the new boundary threw them into Pine Ridge Reservation, they insisted upon being counted on the Pine Ridge rolls.
To the Wazhazhas the solution was simple and logical. To Commissioner of Indian Affairs Morgan it was equally simple and logical: "The Indians whose case is now under consideration, belonging to and receiving rations and annuities at the Rosebud Agency, as they do and did at the date of the Sioux Act, have as I conceive, no interest in the lands of the Pine Ridge Reservation, although residing on a portion thereof." This being clearly evident, he saw no course but to move the families across the line. But one of Secretary Noble's inspectors thought otherwise, and Morgan was directed to find out how the Rosebud and Pine Ridge people as a whole felt about it. As might have been predicted, they could not agree. Noble was all set to end the controversy by sending the families to Rosebud when Agent Wright pointed out that the line had never been surveyed and that they might already be living on the Rosebud side. As no surveyors could be spared, Wright and Gallagher were told to run the boundary. But the Wazhazhas took matters into their own hands and stampeded toward Pine Ridge Agency. They went into camp on Wounded Knee Creek, about fifteen miles east of the agency, and vowed to stay there until they had their way.
At this juncture, to compound the confusion, about half the Lower Brulés suddenly decided that they wanted to move from their agency on the Missouri down to Rosebud and live with the Upper Brulés. Morgan patiently explained the legal reasons why they could not, but the Lower Brulés were not impressed. By the end of the summer, no decision had been reached on either question, and everyone involved was confused and angry.
The census begun the previous summer also irritated the Sioux. On top of a long-standing aversion to being counted, they were sure that it would produce another ration cut. All over the Rosebud Reservation, Census Agent A. T. Lea encountered trickery, evasion, and opposition. Old White Horse, a notable nonprogressive, went a step further and bluntly refused to submit his band to enumeration. Inspector W. W. Junkin happened to be visiting the agency, and Lea called for help. The Secretary's "Big Cats" usually inspired the Sioux with more respect than the "Little Cats," who, as resident agents, took orders from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs; but Junkin made no headway. Finally, he had Wright suspend beef issues to White Horse's band and had the police throw White Horse, High Hawk, and Lance in the agency jail. This brought the rebels to terms. Lea finished at Rosebud in late May and moved on to Pine Ridge. Here he ran into the same obstacles and could not have finished the job without constant help from the police. Although the final count showed little change since 1880 in the total number of Teton Sioux, the Rosebud figure dropped by nearly 2,000— principally, explained Wright, because of fatal epidemics. (The Brulés had been overcounting themselves, too.) Reduction in population, of course, brought further reduction in rations.
Always uneasy in the presence of bluecoats, the Sioux this summer lived under more than ordinary military scrutiny. The 500 Cheyennes under Little Chief enrolled at Pine Ridge had been agitating for seven years to transfer to the Tongue River Reservation in Montana, where their kinsmen lived. In the spring of 1890 they had begun to act very much as if they intended to go without permission. Upon an inspector's recommendation, Secretary Noble asked for soldiers to move in and by their presence suggest to the Cheyennes the folly of such a course. Two troops of cavalry from Fort Meade set up camp at Oelrichs, west of Pine Ridge on the trail to Tongue River. Here they remained during the summer, keeping the reservation under observation.
Other soldiers marched down Cheyenne River uncomfortably close to Cheyenne River Reservation. About 130 nonprogressives from this reservation, incensed over the land agreement, had moved eighty miles up the river in order to live as far as possible from the agency. McChesney feared they would molest the whites expected to occupy the land that had been opened to settlement south of the river. He asked for soldiers. Three troops of cavalry and two companies of infantry from Fort Meade, Capt. A. G. Henissee commanding, established a "camp of observation" near the forks of Cheyenne River. All summer they kept watch.
The anguish of the summer of 1890, so patently attributable to the white man, dramatized to the dullest Sioux the depths to which the tribes had been depressed. Sensing perhaps the final chance to restore their waning power, the nonprogressive chiefs on each reservation stiffened their opposition to official policies and made a desperate bid to enlist adherents from the progressive and uncommitted ranks. They recited the impressive list of grievances amassed in a decade of reservation life, dwelt at length on the land agreement and its sequel of broken promises, and recalled the days when the Sioux lived unrestrained by reservation boundaries and senseless regulations. Always a source of trouble to the agents, these chiefs now became causes for alarm.
At Standing Rock, Sitting Bull bore the standard of reaction. Unlike other hostile leaders, notably Gall, Sitting Bull refused to be reconstructed. Surrounded by most of the nonprogressive element of Standing Rock, he lived with his family in a small log cabin on Grand River, forty miles southwest of the agency. Except for a tour as a feature attraction of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, he had carried on a constant feud with McLaughlin from the first. Backed by the power of the Government, the agent usually won the battles. But Sitting Bull refused to concede him victory in the war. "Crafty, avaricious, mendacious, and ambitious," McLaughlin characterized his adversary in later years. "I never knew him to display a single trait that might command admiration or respect." Even so, he was still the greatest chief and medicine man of the Sioux Nation, an elder statesman whose political, military, and religious triumphs of old had left him with a reputation and a demeanor of authority that few Hunkpapas or Yanktonais, even progressives, could resist when it came to a showdown.
So troublesome had Sitting Bull and his lieutenants become by 1890 that McLaughlin seized the flimsiest pretext to try to rid himself of them. When the Indian Bureau in June passed on Charles Hyde's warning of an impending uprising and called for reports from the agents, McLaughlin, while denying that his people harbored hostile intentions, suggested the removal from Standing Rock of "the leaders of disaffection"—Sitting Bull, Circling Bear, Black Bird, and Circling Hawk. Such a move, he believed, "would end all trouble and uneasiness in the future." He was doubtless correct, but the Indian Bureau quite rightly took no action, for none of these men had committed any overt act to justify their removal.
McLaughlin's troubles were minor compared with those at Cheyenne River, Pine Ridge, and Rosebud. His nonprogressives formed a smaller share of the total population than on any other reservation, and he enjoyed the support of such influential leaders as John Grass, Gall, and Crow King. At Cheyenne River the most influential men were Hump and Big Foot, both vocal spokesmen for the old life. Hump had played an important role in the Custer Battle, but his later service as scout for General Miles had earned him the confidence of Army officers and had led to his appointment, paradoxically, as chief of police at Cheyenne River. His band, numbering nearly 600, lived on Cherry Creek, about sixty miles west of the agency. All attempts to break up this nest of reaction had failed. Wearing his badge and uniform, Hump had led the opposition to the Crook Commission, although in the unpredictable shifting of Indian politics he had later signed the land agreement. Big Foot had not, and he had angrily led his band up Cheyenne River. Eighty miles west of the agency they built cabins and, under the vigilant eyes of Captain Henissee's soldiers, sullenly watched settlers trickle into the ceded land across the river.
Red Cloud still ranked as the top nonprogressive at Pine Ridge. The stature he had won in the war of 1866–68 over the Bozeman Trail, coupled with two decades of readiness to sound the trumpet of freedom, left him the undisputed patriarch of the Oglalas. But he was old and his eyes were failing. Although he held the respect of his people, his grip had loosened, and such mildly reactionary chiefs as Little Wound and Big Road were gaining influence. American Horse and Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses championed the progressive cause, but their role in selling the land agreement had weakened their authority. Agent Gallagher, moreover, had alienated these chiefs. The reactionaries thus regained some of the power that McGillycuddy had labored to destroy, and the police lost much of the effectiveness they had achieved under McGillycuddy. Gallagher's replacement would suffer the consequences of this shift in power relationships.
At Rosebud, the bulwark of reaction, no single chief enjoyed the eminence of Red Cloud. After Crow Dog murdered Spotted Tail in 1881, a squad of Brulés maneuvered to seize his mantle, but none possessed the requisite qualities. The principal contenders in 1890 were Two Strike, Crow Dog, High Hawk, Turning Bear, Lance, and Eagle Pipe. Of these men, only Two Strike was actually a chief. He and Spotted Tail had been youthful companions in the long-ago wars against the Pawnees, and it was in a battle with the Pawnees that Two Strike had gained his name. Now, although a prominent chief, Two Strike was seventy years old and was growing infirm and senile.
That the chiefs sensed a favorable climate for a comeback and that their efforts enjoyed a measure of success were symptoms of the deep distress felt by the Sioux. The underlying causes had operated for ten years. The immediate causes were the broken promises of the Crook Commission and the crop failure that, together with reduced rations, forecast hunger and possibly starvation in the months ahead. Only a catalyst was needed to turn sullen resentment into violent protest. In midsummer Kicking Bear returned from his visit to the Arapahoes and told of the regeneration Wovoka's religion had worked upon this tribe. Again he preached to the Sioux his own twisted version of the Paiute prophet's doctrine. The hot winds that withered the cornstalks nourished the seed of the Ghost Dance religion. This time it took root and sprang into full bloom before the agents could act.
## _6. CRISIS FOR THE SIOUX AGENTS_
IN WYOMING, Kicking Bear had watched the Arapahoes dance the Ghost Dance and go into trances that enabled them to see friends long dead and wonders of the world to come. Returning home, he stopped early in August for a visit with the Oglalas at Pine Ridge. His story of the miraculous happenings among the Arapahoes caught the Sioux at the climax of the terrible summer. They were ripe for just such miracles themselves. Kicking Bear fired the Oglalas with the faith and taught them the mechanics of the dance.
Red Cloud shrewdly avoided committing himself. If the story were true, he said, "it would spread all over the world." If it were false, he stated for the agent's benefit, "it would melt like the snow under the hot sun." Other chiefs were not so cautious. At his camp on Medicine Root Creek, Little Wound called together his people and advised: "My friends, if this is a good thing we should have it; if it is not it will fall to the earth itself. So you better learn this dance, so if the Messiah does come he will not pass us by, but will help us to get back our hunting grounds and buffalo." Some 300 people were soon staging regular Ghost Dances there. On Wounded Knee Creek, Big Road, Shell Boy, and Good Thunder (one of the delegates of 1889 to Mason Valley) organized another dance, which attracted 250 people. Torn Belly, His Fight, Bear Bone, and Jack Red Cloud, the old chief's son, enlisted 600 dancers at a camp on White Clay Creek north of the agency. A fourth dance group, with 150 members, sprang up on Porcupine Creek under the guidance of Knife Chief, Iron Bird, and Whetstone.
From their cheerless cabins the dancers gathered. Just as in the old days, they pitched tepees on the valley floor near the cottonwood groves that fringed the creek. Surrounded on all sides by lodges, the circular dance ground was the focus of activity. The dancers cut a sapling and mounted it in the center. From the top of this prayer tree fluttered a small American flag or strips of brightly colored cloth. From its base the leader of the Ghost Dance presided over the ceremonies.
They began at dawn with the cleansing and purifying rite of the sweat bath. The sweat lodge was a diminutive structure shaped of willow wands and covered with skins. The entrance opened to the east, greeting the morning sun. Facing it from a mound of earth, a buffalo skull peered inside. Like inverted bowls, sweat lodges dotted the valley around the village. Clad only in breechcloths, several dancers entered the lodge and squatted on a carpet of freshly cut wild sage. The medicine man heated stones on a fire nearby and with forked sticks passed them through the entrance. The disciples rolled them into a hole dug in the center of the lodge and poured cold water on them. Outside, the medicine man prayed, while inside his followers sweated in billowing clouds of steam trapped by the tightly fastened lodge cover. Purged of moral impurity, the men emerged at length and plunged into the nearby stream.
Next the leader and his assistants prepared the people for the dance. The face of each was painted. Forehead, cheeks, and chin bore circles, crescents, and crosses that symbolized sun, moon, and morning star. Colors varied, but red, the color of Wi, the Sun, became also the color of the Ghost Dance among all the western tribes. Wovoka had so decreed, and he gave small cakes of red ochre to the apostles who came to Mason Valley. These cakes from the Messiah himself were much sought after. A few grains mixed with the locally made paint of the Sioux helped a dancer to experience the vision he sought in the Ghost Dance and also had value as a weapon against the malevolent gods who caused illness.
No other part of the body was painted, for Ghost Dancers were fully clothed. The central feature of the costume, worn above buckskin leggings, was the Ghost Shirt. It was a sacklike garment of cotton cloth or muslin ornamented, like the face, with painted circles, crescents, and crosses, and with designs symbolizing the eagle, magpie, crow, sage hen, and other birds and animals having special significance in Sioux mythology. Many were fringed and adorned with feathers. The medicine man preached that the Ghost Shirt made its wearer invulnerable to rifle bullets. If soldiers fired at an Indian so protected, the bullets would fall harmlessly to the ground. The idea behind the Ghost Shirt was not new: warriors had long carried ceremonial devices and had even worn "medicine shirts" designed to turn away the bullets and arrows of the enemy. Other Ghost Dancing tribes adopted the Ghost Shirt, but only the Sioux invested it with bulletproof qualities.
The dancers believed, and they drew courage from the conviction that no longer were the bluecoats to be dreaded. The Sioux apostles had perverted Wovoka's doctrine into a militant crusade against the white man. Now they removed any reason the faithful might have to fear open conflict with the white man. The mixture was indeed explosive.
As in the world to come there would be no white men or material reminders of white men, so in the Ghost Dance Wovoka had ordained that nothing of white manufacture could be worn or carried. This injunction applied to all metal objects, including knives, guns, and the silver jewelry and belts of which the Sioux were so fond. In the earlier dances the Sioux usually heeded this rule, but as time went on and the dance turned increasingly down belligerent paths, an occasional rifle or carbine made its appearance in the dance circle.
Eagle feathers fixed in the hair completed the attire. These, Wovoka had explained, would enable the people to mount into the sky when the millennium came. But they possibly took on another purpose as the dance grew more turbulent. George Sword's vague explanation, which doubtless suffered in translation, suggests that the Sioux regarded the eagle feathers as another magic weapon against the whites. "The ghost dancers all have to wear eagle feather on head," he declared. "With this feather any man would be made crazy if fan with this feather."
The dance began about noon. Dancers of all ages and both sexes sat in a large circle facing the center of the dance ring. Often, when several hundred participated, they ranged themselves in concentric circles. The dance leader, flanked by his assistants, took station at the foot of the prayer tree and gave detailed instructions to his followers. Then, raising his arms to heaven, he prayed: "Great Wakan Tanka: We are ready to begin the dance as you have commanded us. Our hearts are now good. We would do all that you ask, and in return for our efforts we beg that you give us back our old hunting grounds, and our game. Oh, transport such of the dancers as are really in earnest to the Spirit Land far away and let them there see their dead relatives. Show them what good things you have prepared for us and return the visitors safely to earth again. Hear us, we implore."
The people stood and clasped hands. Someone started a ghost song. It was rhythmic but without rhyme, and evoked misty images of the past. The singer began softly:
Someone cometh to tell news, to tell news;
There shall be a buffalo chase,
There shall be a buffalo chase;
Make arrows; make arrows.
The song rose slightly in intensity and took on emotion. The dancers bent their knees to produce a rise and fall of their bodies, and with a shuffling side step started the dance rings moving slowly and hypnotically to the left. The people joined the singing, softly at first but with rising volume and quickening tempo.
Raise the tepee, hurry, raise the tepee, hurry,
I wish to cook soon, I wish to cook soon;
Drive the pins around the tepee,
Drive the pins around the tepee;
Saith thy mother, saith thy mother.
After half an hour the dancing stopped. "Weep for your sins," cried the dance leader. A great moan punctuated by piercing wails of the women rose from the dance rings. Dancers rolled on the ground crying for forgiveness. Others crowded around the prayer tree to thrust gifts among the limbs. A few cut their bodies in the ancient fashion of showing grief and smeared blood on the tree. The leader signaled, and the dancers, reforming the circles, sat down. He preached a short sermon. The dance resumed, the people moving faster now, showing exaltation, singing of the world of the future.
The people are coming home,
The people are coming home,
Saith my father, saith my father,
Saith my father.
The time cometh, I shall see him,
The time cometh, I shall see him,
Saith thy mother, saith thy mother.
Faster went the circle, bending and weaving with the contortions of the dancers. Their arms and legs twitched, and their bodies shook as if possessed of demons. They leaped erratically forward, backward, and into the air. Songs gave way to wails and shouts. The holy men dashed around the circle, waving eagle feathers and exhorting dancers to yet higher pitches of delirium. They pulled the most excited from the ring and gently pushed them to the ground. Hovering over a prostrate dancer, the medicine man muttered incantations and gazed deeply into the subject's eyes. "He stared into my eyes like a snake," recalled one, "and then I knew no more." Rigid bodies littered the dance circle, their spirits gone for a visit to the other world. People who had not achieved the ultimate raced to and fro, butted trees, and threw themselves violently to the ground, all in a supreme effort to gain admission to the Spirit Land. A white observer described how "several in their frenzy rushed against our horses and were thrown headlong to the ground." In utter chaos the dance went on and on "until all became so exhausted as to be able only to writhe on the ground, screaming and moaning all the time."
Those rewarded with a journey to the Spirit Land told wondrous tales of their adventures, inspiring others to struggle yet harder to bring on a vision. Little Horse described how
two holy eagles transported me to the Happy Hunting Grounds. They showed me the Great Messiah there, and as I looked upon his fair countenance I wept, for there were nail-prints in his hands and feet where the cruel whites had once fastened him to a large cross. There was a small wound in his side also, but as he kept himself covered with a beautiful mantle of feathers this wound only could be seen when he shifted his blanket. He insisted that we continue the dance, and promised me that no whites should enter his city nor partake of the good things he had prepared for the Indians. The earth, he said, was now worn out and it should be repeopled.
He had a long beard and long hair and was the most handsome man I ever looked upon.
Little Wound had even more remarkable experiences:
When I fell in the trance a great and grand eagle came and carried me over a great hill, where there was a village such as we used to have before the whites came into the country. The tepees were all of buffalo hides, and we made use of the bow and arrow, there being nothing of white man's manufacture in the beautiful land. Nor were any whites permitted to live there. The broad and fertile lands stretched in every direction, and were most pleasing to my eyes.
I was taken into the presence of the great Messiah, and he spoke to me in these words:
"My child, I am glad to see you. Do you want to see your children and relations who are dead?"
I replied: "Yes, I would like to see my relations who have been dead a long time." The God then called my friends to come up to where I was. They appeared, riding the finest horses I ever saw, dressed in superb and most brilliant garments, and seeming very happy. As they approached, I recognized the playmates of my childhood, and I ran forward to embrace them while the tears of joy ran down my cheeks.
We all went together to another village, where there were very large lodges of buffalo hide, and there held a long talk with the great Wakantanka. Then he had some squaws prepare us a meal of many herbs, meats, and wild fruits and "wasna" [pounded beef and choke-cherries]. After we had eaten, the Great Spirit prayed for our people upon the earth, and then we all took a smoke out of a fine pipe ornamented with the most beautiful feathers and porcupine quills. Then we left the city and looked into a great valley where there were thousands of buffalo, deer, and elk feeding.
After seeing the valley, we returned to the city, the Great Spirit speaking meanwhile. He told me that the earth was now _bad_ and _worn out;_ that we needed a new dwelling place where the rascally whites could not disturb us. He further instructed me to return to my people, the Sioux, and say to them that if they would be constant in the dance and pay no attention to the whites he would shortly come to their aid. If the high priests would make for the dancers medicine shirts and pray over them, no harm could come to the wearer; that the bullets of any whites that desired to stop the Messiah Dance would fall to the ground without doing any one harm, and the person firing such shots would drop dead. He said that he had prepared a hole in the ground filled with hot water and fire for the reception of all white men and non-believers. With these parting words I was commanded to return to earth.
Seeking such experiences, the people danced, with periodic intermissions ordained less by the dance leader than by the limits of physical endurance, until time for the evening meal. After dinner they kindled bonfires and danced until nearly midnight. Then they dispersed to their tepees. At first the dances were staged only on Sunday, "the great medicine day of the white man." Later, as the faithful increasingly pinned all their hopes on the promises of the apostles, they abandoned their cabins and fields to live continuously at the dance camps. The dances grew more frequent, and day after day the dance grounds displayed alternating scenes of solemnity and pandemonium.
The dance began on the Pine Ridge Reservation early in August and within the next two weeks excited increasing numbers of Oglalas to a feverish pitch of enthusiasm. Agent Hugh Gallagher became alarmed. His district farmers urged him to make decisive use of the Indian police to suppress the dance by force. He, too, favored firm measures and, against the advice of Interpreter Philip Wells, began to concentrate the police at the agency. On August 22 he sent a squad to Torn Belly's camp on White Clay Creek, eighteen miles north of the agency, with instructions to break up the dance and send the people home. The police returned the following morning to report that they had been ignored and that the Indians were preparing to dance the next day, Sunday, August 24.
Gallagher decided to look over the situation himself. On Sunday morning, at the head of twenty policemen, he rode to the dance grounds. With him went Philip Wells and Special Agent E. B. Reynolds, who happened to be visiting Pine Ridge. Reaching the destination, they found some 150 tepees littering the valley around the cabins of Torn Belly's band. A dance ground lay in the center of camp, dominated by a prayer tree from which flew an American flag. About 600 people had assembled, but none was to be seen. They had learned of the agent's approach, called off the dance, and taken cover in a grove of trees along the bank of White Clay Creek.
Gallagher led his men into the deserted dance circle and halted. At this moment an Indian with a rifle raced from one of the cabins to the bank of the stream. Another emerged from a thicket and joined the first. They dopped to their knees and confronted the intruders with the muzzles of Winchester rifles. This made Gallagher angry, and he snapped an order for the police to arrest the challengers. Wells translated the order, then, sensing that the agent was asking for more trouble than he could handle, promptly countermanded it on his own responsibility.
When the police failed to advance, Gallagher himself rode toward the two Indians, Wells crowding in front of him. Suddenly the heads of several more Indians appeared above the crest of the creek bank. The agent stopped. "What do you mean when I come as your agent to talk to you and you draw guns on me?" he demanded. Wells translated, adding, in a more conciliatory tone, "Father [one of the men was the father of a good friend of Wells], I want you to obey me; put that gun down and come here." The Indian placed the rifle on the ground and answered, "Yes, my son, I will obey you." Then, to Gallagher, he said, "If you have come to talk to me as my father, why bring so many guns?"
While the agent tried to explain this away, another Indian rose from behind the creek bank and hurled a challenge at the police lieutenant: "Where is Thunder Bear? Why don't he stand in sight?" Thunder Bear accepted the challenge. "Here I am in sight. If you cannot see me I will come closer to you." He moved toward the bank. Now more Indians came into view, brandishing their rifles and making it abundantly clear, as Special Agent Reynolds later recalled, that they "were ready to seal their religious convictions at the mouth of smoking rifles and in defense of what they deemed a religious rite." The police drew their revolvers, and for one tense moment the antagonists tottered on the brink of battle.
At this critical juncture, Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses rode into the dance circle. His very presence subdued the passions of both sides. Wells made haste to explain that the agent had come with no intention of interfering with the ceremony, but simply to see what it was all about. Mollified, the warriors lowered their rifles.
Torn Belly came out of the timber and joined the group. Wells asked if he would announce to his people that the agent would like to hold a council at the agency the following week in order to discuss the new religion. Torn Belly thought a little, then declared that it did not seem quite proper to make such an announcement. After all, it was Sunday and the people were in the midst of religious services. But if the other headmen had no objection, he would do as asked. Torn Belly went into the trees and shortly returned, shook hands with the whites, and said he would be happy to make the announcement. He also invited the visitors to stay and watch the Ghost Dance so they could see for themselves that it was not harmful. The Indians emerged from the trees and, as the whites watched, resumed the dance.
Gallagher and Reynolds were probably the first officials to witness a Ghost Dance. It alarmed both. Reynolds reported to Washington his conviction that "steps should be taken to stop it" and ominously predicted that "this can only be done by the military unless the cold weather accomplishes it." Gallagher warned his superiors that the new religion might have unhappy consequences "should there be no restriction placed upon it."
He for one had no intention of trying to restrict it. Very soon it would become a Republican problem. Early in August he had received the long-expected word from Washington that his services were no longer required. A Republican agent had been appointed. While Gallagher sat anxiously in his office awaiting the arrival of his successor, the Ghost Dance swept through the Oglalas and, in the wake of Kicking Bear's triumphal journey homeward, jumped the reservation boundary and ignited the Brulés of Rosebud.
The craze seized the Rosebud people in September, taking hold first at the camp of White Horse (who had been jailed the previous spring for obstructing the census) and from there spreading swiftly to the other nonprogressive camps. People abandoned their farms and stock, withdrew their children from school, and flocked to the dance centers. As one of the original delegates to Mason Valley, Short Bull again rose to prominence as the ranking apostle of the Ghost Dance among the Brulés.
About the middle of September the Brulés trooped into the agency for the biweekly ration day. The Ghost Dance adherents talked of nothing but the new religion and exchanged stories of their adventures in the Spirit Land. Suddenly a rumor flashed through the camps that soldiers were on the reservation, come to stamp out the Ghost Dance and punish the dancers. Instantly the men stampeded to their tepees. They stripped to breechcloths, donned war paint, and snatched their weapons. Before Agent Wright could find out what had happened, they were galloping southward from the agency. Riding out in pursuit, Wright discovered them drawn up across the road to Fort Niobrara waiting for the troops. With difficulty he convinced them that the report was false, and they returned to the agency.
Angry over the episode, Wright decided that the time had come for a showdown. Next day he assembled the Brulés and announced that the Ghost Dance must stop. Until he was satisfied that it had stopped, there would be no rations. The people went home to reflect with empty stomachs on the true depths of their devotion to the religion. All but a small corps of fanatics placed their stomachs first, and the agent lifted the suspension of ration issues.
Then one of the Secretary of the Interior's inspectors, J. H. Cisney, arrived at Rosebud to investigate the unusual reduction in population recorded by Census Agent Lea. The census counted only 5,250 Indians, yet Wright had regularly received rations and annuities for 7,500. The inspector quickly concluded that Wright had pocketed the value of a year's supplies for more than 2,000 Indians and summarily suspended him. Although Wright managed to prove his innocence and was back on the job by early December, the inspector's action forced him to leave his post at a critical time.
Late in September, Special Agent E. B. Reynolds came from Pine Ridge to act temporarily in Wright's place. The Brulés took advantage of his ignorance of conditions and personalities at Rosebud to resume the Ghost Dance. Harangued by Short Bull, they were soon beyond control. Every cent went for arms and ammunition. In order to get money, the Indians traded ponies and sold possessions for a pittance. At the trading posts they cashed receipts for firewood delivered to the agency for one-third their face value. They openly slaughtered breeding stock for food and defied anyone to stop them. Reynolds sent policemen to arrest two particularly bad offenders. Seventy-five armed warriors intervened, and the police returned empty-handed. The captain reported that his men were powerless to enforce the rules and regulations of the Indian Bureau. When Reynolds remonstrated with the dancers, they replied that they would rather die fighting than from starvation. Besides, there was no reason to fear death, for when the millennium came next spring all dead Indians would be resurrected. Finally, early in November, Reynolds reported to Washington that "there appears to be but one remedy... and that is a sufficient force of troops, to prevent an outbreak, which is imminent and which any one of a dozen unforseen causes may precipitate."
Having kindled the fires of defiance at Pine Ridge and Rosebud, Kicking Bear reached home about the middle of September. Long noted for the recalcitrance of its nonprogressives, Cheyenne River promptly took to the Ghost Dance with enthusiasm. Indeed, as Kicking Bear's headquarters, it became the fountain-head of all wisdom and lore of the doctrine, and Indians from other Sioux reservations came by the score to seek inspiration from the most incendiary of all the Sioux apostles. At his Cherry Creek camp, Hump threw off his police uniform and, donning the Ghost Shirt, presided over a succession of wild dances that soon attracted about 400 Miniconjous. Equally fanatical dances consumed the energy of Big Foot's band on Cheyenne River, beyond the western edge of the reservation. The band of 128 that had moved there in the spring swelled to 300. An officer stationed at Captain Henissee's "camp of observation," two miles west of Big Foot's village, wrote that the dances "are held by day and night; in fact, as long as they are able to move and keep awake, the Indians continue their efforts to please the Great Spirit."
The capable Charles McChesney no longer administered Cheyenne River. A Republican agent had taken over on September 1. Under "Home Rule," a new twist to the spoils system that put agency appointments entirely in the hands of senators and representatives, Cheyenne River became the patronage preserve of South Dakota's Congressman J. A. Pickler. He had named one Perain P. Palmer to replace McChesney. Palmer may have been, as Pickler assured Secretary of the Interior Noble, "a cool man and a man of good judgment," although some observers formed different evaluations; but he was thrust without experience into a difficult job at a difficult time. He proved no match for such determined zealots as Kicking Bear, Hump, and Big Foot.
Palmer started out by informing the dancers that the Interior Department was displeased with their behavior. They replied, he somewhat plaintively reported to the Indian Commissioner, "that the Indians is displeased with the Department _and will dance."_ Next he turned to Straight Head, new captain of police, and had him send some men up the river to stop the proceedings at the camps of Hump and Big Foot. The dancers met the intruders with Winchesters, which the police revolvers could not match even had the lawmen been disposed to use them. Several times in September and October, Palmer tried to break up the dance in this way, but on each occasion the police returned to report failure. Suffering repeated setbacks and sinking prestige, the force began to fall apart as, one after another, the policemen turned in their badges. Finally, on November 10, Palmer reported that "there is no doubt now that the Hostile Indians at all the dancing camps are preparing to defy the authority of the Department."
At Standing Rock, Sitting Bull had listened anxiously to the reports that came from the southern agencies. He importuned Agent McLaughlin for a pass to visit Cheyenne River but was repeatedly turned down. Unable to escape the watchful eyes of the agent's spies at Grand River, he finally sent an invitation to Kicking Bear to bring the word to the Standing Rock Sioux. The apostle arrived at Grand River on October 9 and revealed the mysteries to Sitting Bull. In a public oration, Kicking Bear glowingly described his meeting with Wovoka and enumerated the miracles vouchsafed by the Nevada prophet. Then he taught the Grand River people the dance.
McLaughlin immediately sent Captain Crazy Walking and Lieutenant Chatka with eleven policemen to eject Kicking Bear from the reservation. But a badge was no guarantee against the mysterious powers of the Ghost Dance apostle, and the captain, awed by the spectacle of the dance and the force of Kicking Bear's personality, could not find the courage to carry out his instructions. He told Sitting Bull that Kicking Bear must leave, then he hastily led his men back to the agency. McLaughlin next assigned the mission to Lieutenant Chatka, who set out with only two men. Of sterner mold than his captain, Chatka marched through a ring of dancers on the morning of October 15 and commanded Kicking Bear and his six companions to obey the agent's order forthwith, then escorted them to the reservation boundary.
But the damage had been done. Sitting Bull set up a prayer tree and erected a large tent from which to superintend the dances and daily deliver himself of revelations. He may truly have believed the Messiah's message; more likely, he saw in it a new weapon to raise against McLaughlin and restore his own power among the Hunkpapas. His biographer, Stanley Vestal, contends that he wanted to believe and tried very hard to induce a vision, but in the end failed because he was too much Indian to embrace a faith founded on the teachings of Christianity. To an extent, also, he became a prisoner of his own zealous followers, who demanded that he lead them into the promised land so eloquently portrayed by Kicking Bear. Whatever his personal convictions and motives, Sitting Bull did in fact act the part of apostle of the Ghost Dance at Standing Rock.
The Yanktonais and, to a lesser degree, the Blackfeet Sioux held aloof. They had advanced much farther on the white man's road than the Hunkpapas. McLaughlin estimated that the religion infected about 450 people, almost entirely among the followers of Sitting Bull. The Grand River schoolteacher, John M. Carignan, observed in his classroom an index of the intensity of their devotion. The sixty pupils who showed up on September 1 dwindled to three in October. The children, the parents explained, could not come to school because they had to go to "church" every day.
Congregational missionary Mary Collins tried to stop the dancing. For several years she had run a small mission at Little Eagle, ten miles down Grand River, and had carried on a friendly rivalry with Sitting Bull for the spiritual allegiance of the people who lived along the river. She and her assistant, Mr. Grindstone, "a little old man but possessed [of] a great deal of character," would charge into the dance circles and challenge the Great Mysterious to make good his promise, relayed by Sitting Bull, to cause the earth to swallow the unbeliever. She for one believed that these demonstrations shook the faith of many Hunkpapa dancers.
Another who grappled with the craze was Mrs. Catherine Weldon, a neurotic Boston widow who first came to Standing Rock in the summer of 1889 to fight the Crook Commission on behalf of the National Indian Defense Association. Fascinated by the aboriginal splendor and charming manners of Sitting Bull, she returned in the spring of 1890 and filed on a homestead north of the Standing Rock boundary. She lavished money and expensive gifts on Sitting Bull and was always welcome in the Grand River camp. To McLaughlin's vast annoyance, she appointed herself adviser to the Hunkpapas in all their dealings with the Government. Dakota newspapers labeled her "Sitting Bull's White Squaw." In fact the old chief, taking at face value her insistence upon performing his domestic chores, did propose to make her his third wife—an overture she indignantly rejected. Mrs. Weldon threw all her energy into the fight against Kicking Bear's teachings, then gave up in despair and went home. "If I had known what obstinate minds I had to contend with," she later wrote, "I would not have undertaken this mission to enlighten and instruct them. It was money, health and heart thrown away."
As the Grand River dances grew stormier, settlers along the east bank of the Missouri River and at Bismarck and Mandan grew increasingly apprehensive. Newspapers reflected their alarm. McLaughlin saw a chance to reopen a question that had been dormant since June. On October 17 he wrote a long letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs describing the progress of the dance at Standing Rock. While expressing confidence that he could control any trouble that might spring from the religion, he spelled out the one move that in his judgment would assure return to normalcy: "I would respectfully recommend the removal from the reservation and confinement in some military prison... of Sitting Bull and the parties named in my letter of June 18 last... some time during the coming winter and before next spring opens."
Acting Commissioner Belt (Commissioner Morgan was in Oklahoma inspecting Indian schools) recognized the need for some move to repress the excitement and thought McLaughlin's recommendation likely to achieve results. But the arrest of Sitting Bull and his associates had to be carefully engineered. The criticism that it would inevitably generate in some quarters must fall elsewhere than on the Interior Department. His recommendation to Secretary Noble was therefore that the Secretary of War be asked to have the Army arrest Sitting Bull and the other chiefs and imprison them "until such time as their presence on the reservation may not be deemed dangerous to the peace of the Indians."
But Noble was not yet ready to open such a Pandora's box. Belt's response to McLaughlin's proposal, dated October 29, expressed the Secretary's reluctance to act so boldly. The agent must tell Sitting Bull and other troublemakers that the Secretary was "greatly displeased with their conduct" and would hold Sitting Bull to "a strict personal responsibility for the misconduct, acts of violence, or any threats, actions, or movements" to which any of the Sioux might be influenced by the Hunkpapa leader. Such behavior would be severely punished. To show his good faith, Sitting Bull must submit to government authority immediately and cause his people "to turn their backs upon the medicine men who are seeking to divert the Indians from the ways of civilization." More conversant with Indians than his superiors, McLaughlin did not hasten to make himself look silly by conveying the message to Sitting Bull.
He did, however, go to Grand River to view the situation in person. On November 16 he and his interpreter, Louis Primeau, walked in on a Ghost Dance in full swing. Nearly 100 people—men, women, and children—were gyrating rhythmically around the prayer tree while another 200 watched. From his headquarters tepee, Sitting Bull and his assistant, Bull Ghost, directed the proceedings. A young girl went into a trance and "died." Carried to the tent, she lay on the ground while Sitting Bull interpreted her conversation with long-dead relatives in the Spirit Land. Wisely deciding not to interrupt the ceremonies, McLaughlin and Primeau went to the cabin of Henry Bull Head, police lieutenant who lived up the river, and spent the night.
Early next morning, McLaughlin confronted Sitting Bull as he emerged from a sweat bath. For seven years these two had struggled for mastery of the Standing Rock Sioux. Each was an unyielding partisan of his own way of life, and each was incapable of appreciating or even understanding the other's point of view. Now, as a curious throng gathered, the antagonists once more—for the last time—faced each other. McLaughlin persuaded, threatened, and cajoled, to no avail. Sitting Bull offered to settle the whole affair. He and the agent would journey together from tribe to tribe, following the stories to their source at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. If the Messiah in the end was shown not to exist in all the splendor that had been told, Sitting Bull would return to Standing Rock and kill the religion. If the stories proved true, however, McLaughlin must quit interfering. Such a journey, replied McLaughlin, would be like chasing last year's wind. Instead, Sitting Bull should come to the agency where, in one evening, he would convince him of the falseness of the doctrine. Sitting Bull promised to think over the proposal, and on this indecisive note the conference ended. McLaughlin and Primeau returned to the agency.
As it turned out, Sitting Bull found it inadvisable to leave Grand River long enough for a visit to the agency. Perhaps he recalled the soldiers at nearby Fort Yates, who on ration day ostentatiously paraded back and forth and fired their wagon guns at targets. He was not ignorant of McLaughlin's wish to see him behind bars, and for some weeks he had been sending others to draw his rations.
As a matter of fact, McLaughlin wanted no help from the soldiers. Proud of his long service, his apparent immunity from the spoils system, and the record that had earned him the applause of Army officers and reformers alike, he again assured the Indian Bureau of his ability to contain the religious mania. He looked to the deep snows and howling northers of winter as powerful allies in the effort. But Sitting Bull, turning a practiced eye on nature's weather indicators, announced to his followers: "Yes, my people, you can dance all winter this year, the sun will shine warmly and the weather will be fair." The winter of 1890–91 was one of the mildest on record.
McLaughlin's request for Sitting Bull's arrest having met a chilly reception in Washington, he advanced another idea. He proposed, if the Bureau concurred, to inform the Grand River Indians that those who wished to go on record as opposed to the Ghost Dance must come into the agency, camp a few weeks, and be enrolled. Rations would be withheld from all who declined the invitation. McLaughlin was sure that most of Sitting Bull's people would desert their leader when their stomachs were put in jeopardy. Judging from the lessons of a decade, he was right. The letter outlining this plan went to Washington on November 19. It promptly got swallowed by the rush of events.
McLaughlin had controlled his own reservation. Cheyenne River and Rosebud, although exciting places in October and November, were also still under control. Crow Creek and Lower Brulé had yet to be infected. But at Pine Ridge matters had grown progressively worse, and by the third week of November they reached a climax.
Trouble had started with a vengeance on October 9, when the new Republican agent relieved Hugh Gallagher. Under Home Rule, Senator Richard F. Pettigrew claimed the patronage of Pine Ridge. He chose Daniel F. Royer, physician, druggist, newspaperman, and banker of Alpena, South Dakota. Two terms in the territorial legislature constituted Royer's sole qualification for the job. He knew nothing about Indians. In fact, they made him uneasy—a truth the Oglalas were not slow to perceive. They dubbed him "Young-Man-Afraid-of-Indians." His whole attitude toward his charges, recalled schoolteacher Emma Sickels, was "Oh please be good and don't make any trouble." In all the history of Pine Ridge, no worse time could have been found to pin the destinies of the Oglalas to such a temperament.
It was a mean trick the spoils system had worked on Royer. The political plum turned out to be fiery red pepper, and now that he had swallowed it there was no way to get rid of it. "I think he has got an elephant on his hands," Interpreter Philip Wells wrote McLaughlin, "as the craze had taken such a hold on the Indians before he took charge." Worse yet, Royer found on his desk when he arrived a message from Acting Commissioner Belt instructing him to "warn the Indians that said 'ghost dance' will not be allowed on any occasion." Lacking McLaughlin's realism, Royer dutifully relayed the warning. The dancers ignored it, and, not knowing what to do next, he kept on warning them. Already he was thinking how comforting the sight of blue uniforms would be at the agency, and on October 12, after four days on the job, he alerted Belt to the possibility that troops might have to be summoned.
Royer was probably not aware how discordant his words would sound in the Indian Office. For years, Army officers had vigorously denounced the civilians for the way they handled Indian affairs. Time and again, mismanagement had led to hostilities, a call to arms, and some dead soldiers as the price of corruption or incompetence. The officers considered themselves much better equipped to run an agency than the party faithfuls, and several times since the Civil War Congress had come within a few votes of registering agreement by transferring the Indian Bureau to the War Department.
The Bureau had no more vociferous critic in the military ranks than Maj. Gen. Nelson A. Miles, new commanding general of the Division of the Missouri, which embraced much of the plains and mountain West. Miles had one of the most impressive Indian-fighting records in the Army. He was also pompous, vain, outspoken, and dogmatic; and it was whispered that he had presidential ambitions. The last thing Belt wanted was Miles' troops on the Sioux reservations. Once the Army had a foot in the door, anything might happen, even full military control of Indian affairs. Understandably, therefore, Belt fired a letter back to Royer on October 18: "I approve of your course in using persuasion with the chiefs and think you had better continue in that direction."
Persuasion failed. The dancers grew more and more fanatical. They withdrew their children from school, slaughtered breeding stock, and contemptuously defied the police and the agent. The progressives—Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, American Horse, Blue Horse, Standing Soldier, Spotted Horse—threw their influence behind the agent's efforts, but they lacked the power they had once wielded. Red Cloud still perched on the fence. He avoided openly condoning the dances, but the dancers suspected that his sympathies were with them.
As chairman of a commission investigating certain complaints of the Northern Cheyennes, General Miles visited Pine Ridge on October 27 to listen to Little Chief's reasons why his people should live with their kinsmen in Montana. Royer unburdened himself to the great authority on Indians. Miles said that the craze would die out by itself. Next day he held a council with the Oglala chiefs and gave them a fatherly lecture. Little Wound rose to speak. He wanted his people to quit trying to act like whites, he declared. They were Indians and should live like Indians. By dancing the Ghost Dance, they could achieve this purpose. They therefore intended to dance as long as they pleased. And furthermore, would the general please write this down and show it to the Great Father? Miles must have been more than a little surprised. For an Indian to talk this way to a bluecoat who wore two stars on his shoulders was indeed a rarity. It reveals the extent to which the dancers had drawn courage from the personal immunity promised by the prophets. The following day, after the commissioners had departed, Royer called in the chiefs and tried more persuasion. "They simply laughed and said that they would keep it up as long as they pleased."
Reporting developments at Pine Ridge to Belt on October 30, Royer violently exposed in one breathless sentence his agitation, helplessness, and resentment over what he deemed lack of understanding and sympathy from his superiors:
Your Department has been informed of the damage resulting from these dances and of the danger attending them of the crazy Indians doing serious damage to others and the different Agencies I suppose report about the same but I have carefully studied the matter for nearly six weeks [ _sic_ ] and have brought all the persuasion to bear on the leaders that was possible but without effect and the only remedy for this matter is the use of military and until this is done you need not expect any progress from these people on the the other hand you will be made to realize that they are tearing down more in a day than the Government can build in a month.
The day after Royer mailed this letter, there were ominous happenings at Red Leaf's camp, near the Rosebud boundary. Short Bull, the Brulé apostle, delivered a dramatic sermon to an assembled multitude. Alluding to the promised land, he shouted: "I have told you that this would come to pass in two seasons, but since the whites are interfering so much, I will advance the time from what my Father above told me." At the end of one moon, he promised, the earth would shake and the wind blow and "we will go among our dead relations." To prepare for the great day, he enjoined, the faithful must immediately gather at the mouth of Pass Creek and for a full moon (the month of November) zealously dance the Ghost Dance.
The white man must not be permitted to interfere with this last burst of dancing before the millennium:
There may be soldiers surround you, but pay no attention to them, continue the dance. If the soldiers surround you four deep, three of you on whom I have put holy shirts will sing a song, which I have taught you, around them, when some of them will drop dead, then the rest will start to run, but their horses will sink into the earth; the riders will jump from their horses, but they will sink into the earth also; then you can do as you desire with them. Now you must know this, that all the soldiers and that race will be dead; there will be only five thousand [Indians?] left living on the earth. My friends and relations, this is straight and true.
With the road to paradise thus dramatically shortened, many Brulés and some Oglalas flocked to Short Bull's standard. For the next three weeks families and small bands made their way to the mouth of Pass Creek. Kicking Bear showed up to lend the weight of his authority to the proceedings. Swift runners kept Sitting Bull informed of developments at Pass Creek and importuned him to join the assemblage.
Short Bull's doctrine, though militant, was defensive. The awesome supernatural weapons he had described were to be used only if the whites tried to break up the dance. But to many of his followers, animated by religious excitement and driven by hatred of the whites, the distinction between offense and defense was fine indeed. Increasingly, they talked of a holy war against the white man. With an inconsistency not uncommon in fanatical religious movements, the time of the uprising was set to coincide with emergence of the spring grasses, long after the time just set by Short Bull for the millennium. Army reports from the Upper Missouri stated that emissaries from Sitting Bull had urged tribes as far north as Canada to unite in the spring at Bear Butte, near the Black Hills, to drive the whites from the country. Whether Short Bull, Kicking Bear, and Sitting Bull encouraged such talk is not apparent, nor is it apparent how much the talk represented actual intentions.
Illustrating the temper of the Ghost Dancers was an incident that happened to James "Scotty" Philip, a rancher who lived at the mouth of Grindstone Butte Creek, in the ceded tract. On November 18 a small band of Brulés under Yellow Thigh, destined for Pass Creek, camped at the Philip Ranch. The twelve men were surly, and they carried their Winchesters ostentatiously. One of them boasted of the day when he had smashed open the heads of white children and drunk the blood of white women. The time was coming, he vowed, when he would do it again. That the buffalo had vanished did not mean the Indians could no longer make war. Right now, he gloated, Philip and other cattlemen were raising horses for the Sioux to ride and cattle for them to eat during the approaching hostilities. (General Miles was even then pointing out this truth to his superiors.) Philip had already had twenty cattle killed, and his neighbors had lost both cattle and horses to passing Indians. As Agent Reynolds had pointed out, with the dancers in this frame of mind, any one of a dozen unforeseen causes might touch off an explosion.
At Pine Ridge the last vestige of Royer's authority vanished. On November 11 this was made publicly and unmistakably clear.
It was ration day. Canvas-covered wagons crowded with Indians in their best finery converged on the agency. At noon everyone gathered at the corral. White herders turned loose the steers one by one, and the men, in the old way of hunting buffalo, shot them down with Winchesters. (The Indian Bureau had already issued orders to stop this "barbarous" custom.) Then they skinned and dressed the meat and divided it among the families. With the ration cut, it did not go far. Women lined up at the commissary, sacks in hand, to draw their meager allotment of flour, bacon, coffee, and sugar. The three trading posts were crowded, and beyond the agency buildings there was horse racing and dancing.
An Indian named Little, wanted by the police for killing cattle, flaunted his immunity around the agency. Royer sent Lieutenant Thunder Bear and a squad of policemen to take him into custody. They found Little outside the combination dispensary and police assembly room. Inside the assembly room, the Oglala headmen were in council. Next door, Dr. Eastman examined patients. A full-blooded Santee Sioux, he had just been appointed agency physician. Already he had begun to court Elaine Goodale, one of the schoolmistresses.
Thunder Bear accosted Little and informed him that he was under arrest. Little drew a butcher knife. Instantly a mob of 200 Ghost Dancers surrounded the police, shouting and brandishing knives, tomahawks, and rifles. The council broke up and the headmen rushed outside. Dr. Eastman came to the door to watch. The dancers seized the police. There were menacing shouts to kill the lawmen, burn the agency, and take control.
The commanding voice of American Horse rose above the din:
Stop! Think! What are you going to do? Kill these men of our own race? Then what? Kill all these helpless white men, women and children? And what then? What will these brave words, brave deeds lead to in the end? How long can you hold out? Your country is surrounded with a network of railroads; thousands of white soldiers will be here within three days. What ammunition have you? What provisions? What will become of your families? Think, think, my brothers! This is a child's madness.
"This man's voice had almost magic power," recalled Dr. Eastman, and dead silence fell upon the mob. Then Jack Red Cloud rushed up to American Horse, shoved the snout of a cocked pistol in his face, and yelled, "It is you and your kind who have brought us to this pass!" With supreme dignity and disdain, American Horse turned his back, slowly mounted the steps to the council room, and closed the door behind him. While the police watched helplessly, the warriors drifted from the scene, taking Little with them. The following day, Royer received a message from Little. It demanded the dismissal of all the policemen who had attempted to arrest him, on penalty of serious trouble the next ration day. Threats were also made against American Horse, and with his wife he moved in for a time with Dr. Eastman. The dancers had openly defied the agent and his police and had got away with it.
The agents in the field and the Indian Bureau in Washington of course had not been operating in a vacuum during these trying weeks. Commanders at the military posts ringing the Sioux country kept their superiors at department and division headquarters fully informed of developments on the reservations. In Washington, copies of the agent's reports were referred to President Harrison and to Secretary of War Redfield Proctor and Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield, commanding the Army. The authorities in Washington grew increasingly concerned as the reports from the Sioux country piled up on their desks. Even more disturbing were the pressures coming from the citizens of Nebraska and North and South Dakota.
Beginning as early as September, all sorts of wild rumors swept these states. The agents had lost control. The Sioux were preparing to descend on ranches and settlements with torches and tomahawks. They had broken loose. They were just over the next hill. At Rushville, Valentine, Pierre, Bismarck, and a score of villages rimming the reservations, settlers met to draft resolutions calling for help. They asked for soldiers to come to their protection, for mobilization of the state militia, for arms and ammunition with which to defend themselves. Telegrams, petitions, and resolutions deluged the governors of each state, senators and congressmen in Washington, and the executive officials responsible for Indian affairs. Newspapers took up the cry, spreading wild stories with incendiary prose and demanding military action against the Sioux. Panic-stricken people abandoned their homesteads and took refuge in the settlements. Many, ruined by the drought anyway, went back East to begin new lives. It would be an unfair exaggeration to accuse all-these westerners of booming an Indian war. But these were hard times, and it could not be denied that large-scale military operations would restore a measure of prosperity.
The cries of anguish rang in the White House and had to be heeded. Besieged on all sides and unable to get a clear picture of the situation, the President on October 31 directed the Secretary of War to order an investigation into conditions in the Sioux country. General Miles had not returned from his travels with the Cheyenne Commission, but Brig. Gen. Thomas H. Ruger, commanding the Department of Dakota, went to Standing Rock and Cheyenne River to investigate.
At Standing Rock, Ruger conferred with McLaughlin and the commander of adjacent Fort Yates, Lt. Col. William F. Drum. The general saw that McLaughlin had his people under control and believed that the agent and Colonel Drum could handle any trouble that arose. All three officials agreed that Sitting Bull must be removed from the reservation, and all three agreed that the task could best be accomplished after winter had set in, by the Indian police supported as necessary by Drum's soldiers.
Ruger next went down to Cheyenne River. Here the situation was less reassuring but still not dangerous. Like Standing Rock, Cheyenne River had a military post, Fort Bennett, within easy supporting distance. Ruger ordered a company of infantry up from Fort Sully to reinforce the company already at Bennett.
Meanwhile, at Pine Ridge, a thoroughly shaken Royer began to bombard the Indian Office with telegrams begging permission to come to Washington and explain matters in person. "The police force are overpowered and disheartened," he warned on the day after the Little affair, "we have no protection, are at the mercy of these crazy dancers." Denying the request to visit Washington, Belt dryly pointed out that if conditions were as chaotic as represented, it hardly seemed an appropriate time for the agent to leave his post. At the same time he could no longer afford to withhold troops from Pine Ridge. On November 13 Belt recommended to Secretary Noble that the War Department be advised of the emergency at Pine Ridge and asked to help. Noble went to the President, who on the same day directed the Secretary of War "to assume responsibility for the suppression of any threatened outbreak, and to take such steps as may be necessary to that end."
In Chicago, General Miles alerted his subordinate headquarters at Omaha and St. Paul to have units ready for dispatch to the Sioux reservations. But it took another frantic appeal from Royer to set them in motion. On November 15 he telegraphed:
Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy. I have fully informed you that the employees and government property at this agency have no protection and are at the mercy of the Ghost Dancers. Why delay by further investigation? _We need protection and we need it now_. I have submitted to you the result of 6 weeks calm conservative investigation and nothing short of 1000 soldiers will settle this dancing. The leaders should be arrested and confined in some military post until the matter is quieted and this should be done at once. Royer, Agt.
Two days later, November 17, Miles instructed Brig. Gen. John R. Brooke, commanding the Department of the Platte, to send troops to Pine Ridge and Rosebud and to deploy the bulk of his command along the railroad and telegraph lines west and south of the reservations.
Were troops necessary? It is a significant question, for the arrival of soldiers on the reservations united the dancers in armed defense of religious freedom and was therefore the immediate cause of the hostilities that later broke out. The answer, it seems evident, is yes. The dancers at Pine Ridge composed about forty per cent of the population, at Rosebud thirty per cent (compared to fifteen per cent at Cheyenne River and ten per cent at Standing Rock). These people were belligerent, suspicious, and excited to the point of irrationality. They expected the white men to interfere with the dance and were prone to consider the most innocuous administrative action as interference. With this state of mind, it was only a question of time until another incident such as the attempted arrest of Little ended in bloodshed. By the middle of November the lives of government employees at Pine Ridge, if not at Rosebud, were clearly in danger.
But the conditions that made troops necessary in November could almost certainly have been avoided if Congress had fulfilled its obligations to the Sioux earlier in the year, and if the spoils system had not placed inexperienced agents at Rosebud, Cheyenne River, and Pine Ridge at a critical time. The old agents—Wright, McChesney, and McGillycuddy, or even Gallagher—could probably have kept the situation in hand until spring failed to bring the expected millennium. Commissioner Morgan correctly assessed the matter when he informed the Secretary of the Interior: "Without denying that there was some real cause for alarm in the beginning of the troubles there [Pine Ridge], I am constrained to the belief that if the emergency had been met by decision and firmness, the excitement might have been allayed and quiet restored without resort to military aid."
## _7. THE ARMY MOVES IN_
AT DAWN ON NOVEMBER 20, 1890, Dr. Eastman was asleep in his quarters at Pine Ridge Agency. Suddenly his assistant rushed into the bedroom and exclaimed, "Come quick, the soldiers are here." The Indian doctor threw off the covers and went to the window. The sun had just burst over the knifelike ridges dotted with stunted pine from which the agency took its name. The shafts of sunlight illuminated a cloud of dust rising from the road to Rushville. The agency sprang to life. Government employees gathered in front of the frame buildings, and the nearby camps of Red Cloud and Red Shirt bustled with the aimless commotion that always marked an Indian village taken by surprise.
The column entered the agency compound. In the van rode Brig. Gen. John R. Brooke with Agent Royer and Special Agent James A. Cooper, whom Belt had sent to fortify the frightened Royer. Next, in column of fours, came three troops of the Ninth Cavalry Regiment, guidons snapping overhead. They were Negro soldiers, each huddled in a buffalo overcoat topped by a muskrat cap. Instantly the Indians dubbed them "buffalo soldiers." Behind the horsemen marched solid ranks of infantry, four companies of the Second Regiment and one of the Eighth Regiment. Completing the martial display, a Hotchkiss cannon and a Gatling gun rattled along in the rear of the caravan. The 170 cavalrymen and 200 infantrymen paraded through the agency and, on its west edge, pitched neat rows of tents on a plateau commanding the valley.
At this same dawn hour of November 20 the people at Rosebud Agency awoke to a similar spectacle—the whites with relief, the Indians with alarm. Lt. Col. A. T. Smith with three companies of the Eighth Infantry, two troops of the Ninth Cavalry, and a Hotchkiss gun had reached the bluffs above the agency at 4:00 A.M. At first light the weary column, composed of 120 infantrymen and 110 cavalrymen, swung down the slope and into the agency.
For the first time since the war of 1876, the soldiers confronted the Sioux.
Much careful planning lay behind the simultaneous arrival of troops at Pine Ridge and Rosebud. In Chicago's Pullman Building, where a suite of offices overlooking Lake Michigan housed the headquarters of the Army's Division of the Missouri, General Miles had pondered the delicate situation. The Indians were not at war, and war was to be avoided if at all possible. Yet war was entirely likely, for no one knew what the Ghost Dancers intended or how they would react to the appearance of troops.
If war came, what were the odds? On the one side, there were about 16,000 Tetons with perhaps 4,000 fighting men. How many would join the hostiles could not be estimated. During the decade of peace most of the Indians had bought the latest version of their favorite firearm, the Winchester repeating rifle or carbine, from traders and the merchants of Valentine and Rushville. Many whites thought that, with the disappearance of the buffalo, the Indian had lost his ability to make war. But Miles knew that domestic cattle and horses now covered the Sioux homeland, affording the Indians a reliable supply of food and transportation. The Sioux, he later wrote, were "far better prepared to wage a war than at any previous time in their history."
But the Army, too, had assets. True, it was as usual unprepared. Garrisons of the scattered forts had stagnated during the years of peace. Training and equipment had suffered neglect. Single-shot Springfield rifles and carbines introduced in 1873 still served as the standard arm. Ammunition, quartermaster supplies, and, above all, wagons and mules had dwindled in quantity to a level inadequate to support emergency field operations. The Division of the Missouri had been reduced in the latest Army reorganization, leaving Miles with only two departments and slightly more than 4,000 combat troops, plus staff.
These deficiencies could be remedied in time. They were far overshadowed by one enormous advantage that Miles had not enjoyed as a regimental commander in 1876 and 1877. A cordon of military posts connected by railroad and telegraph lines now surrounded the Indian homeland. Commanders could communicate almost instantly with subordinates and rush troops in a matter of hours to any point on the perimeter of the Sioux country.
While weighing these considerations, Miles faced the immediate task of restoring order at Pine Ridge and Rosebud. Although the Sioux reservations lay in General Ruger's Department of Dakota, the troops in General Brooke's Department of the Platte were better placed to move swiftly to the trouble spots. On November 17, back from a hurried consultation with Secretary of War Proctor in St. Louis, Miles began wiring instructions to Brooke at Omaha. Commands were to concentrate on the railroad at Valentine and Rushville and, in a night march, hurry simultaneously to the agencies. Brooke himself was to go to Pine Ridge. His mission there was to afford protection to government employees and property and separate the loyal from the "turbulent" Indians. If this sparked war, he was to deploy the infantry to protect settlements and guard supply trains and to hold the cavalry in mobile columns to pursue and destroy the hostiles.
Brooke planned to have columns at Rosebud and Pine Ridge on the morning of November 20. On the evening of the 18th, two special trains left Omaha bearing wagons and Companies A, B, C, and D of the Second Infantry under Maj. Edmund Butler from Fort Omaha. At midnight General Brooke and his aide boarded a third train and settled themselves in the private coach of the manager of the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad for the trip to Rushville. Pausing at Valentine next morning, Brooke conferred with Lt. Col. A. T. Smith, who commanded Fort Niobrara. As the train pulled out of the station, Smith pointed his column north for the thirty-mile hike to Rosebud.
By early afternoon of the 19th Brooke had reached Rushville, where Royer and Special Agent Cooper met the train. At Brooke's request, Royer had ridden down from Pine Ridge to discuss the situation at the agency with the general. The newspapers charged that he had taken fright and abandoned his post, but both Brooke and Cooper later endorsed Royer's explanation. Company C, Eighth Infantry, and Troops F, I, and K, Ninth Cavalry, had hastened up from Fort Robinson to join the infantry from Omaha. On the evening of the 19th, the column set forth on the road to Pine Ridge.
The bluecoated specter that had haunted the Sioux for a decade, that in times of stress had always restrained them from carrying defiance beyond the agent's limit of tolerance, had at last materialized in their midst. Rumors of the mobilization of troops had reached the Oglalas and Brulés on November 19 and were confirmed on the 20th. The progressives, joined by a number of dancers alarmed at what their activities had wrought, took fright and promptly heeded General Brooke's order, relayed by swift-riding Indian policemen, to abandon their homes and gather at the agency. By November 23 hundreds of families who wished to be counted as "friendlies" had come in. Missionaries, schoolteachers, farmers, and other whites who worked in the outlying reservation districts also assembled under the guns of the soldiers. Tepees littered the bottom lands surrounding Pine Ridge Agency, a picture of disorder contrasting sharply with the ranks of A-tents that marked the military camp. Sentries patrolled the agency streets and stood guard at the key buildings. General Brooke placed a twenty-four-hour guard on the Oglala boarding school, keeping 100 youngsters locked inside—partly, thought Elaine Goodale, as security for the good behavior of the parents.
The arrival of troops electrified the die-hard Ghost Dancers. On Medicine Root, Wounded Knee, and White Clay Creeks, the followers of Little Wound, Big Road, and No Water at first milled about in confusion, not knowing quite what to do. Then Little Wound took charge, and the dances resumed with a fury born of the crisis. On the nights of November 20 and 21, under Little Wound's orders, painted warriors decked in war costume dashed through the countryside, alerting all who wished to be numbered with the faithful to assemble on White River at the mouth of White Clay Creek. On the 22nd Census Agent Lea came to the agency and reported the dancers already massing at the appointed rendezvous. They disclaimed any intention of taking the offensive but vowed to defend themselves if attacked. "If the soldiers come here," said one, "we will treat them the way we did the agent and his policemen." The rebels declared that they would dance all winter, then in the spring go on a "big hunt"—the warpath, thought Lea. Meanwhile, they would ignore the agent and the troops. "Nor will they pay attention to the regulations of the Department," Lea relayed; "what little they get from it they can well do without." These Oglalas were well armed and supplied with plenty of ammunition, and they maintained an efficient system of picket outposts and roving scouts.
At Rosebud the arrival of troops triggered a virtual stampede of Brulés, about 1,100 people instantly heading west. Part, under Two Strike, made directly for Pine Ridge. The old chief, whose mental stability had been increasingly questioned of late, vowed to stab General Brooke as the first act of war. But he stopped on Wounded Knee Creek, fifteen miles east of Pine Ridge Agency, and joined the 700 discontented Wazhazhas who had fled Pass Creek during the boundary controversy in July. The rest of the defecting Brulés, led by Eagle Pipe, Turning Bear, High Hawk, Lance, No Flesh, Pine Bird, Crow Dog, and White Horse, congregated in the northwest corner of the Rosebud Reservation and soon turned up at the mouth of Pass Creek to swell the ranks of Short Bull's followers. On November 25 Short Bull broke camp and moved up White River to unite his people with the Oglala dancers at the mouth of White Clay Creek.
Meanwhile, General Miles continued the military build-up. His appeal for restoration of the former division boundaries had been heeded, and he could now call on troops in Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona. Within the week following November 20, General Brooke was heavily reinforced at Pine Ridge. Col. Frank Wheaton marched in with the remaining four companies of the Second Infantry. Another troop of the Ninth Cavalry came from Fort McKinney, Wyoming, under Maj. Guy V. Henry, who took command of the squadron of the Ninth. (At the battle of the Rosebud, in 1876, the Sioux had shot away half his face.) On November 26, after a tedious train ride from Fort Riley, Kansas, the entire Seventh Cavalry, Col. James W. Forsyth commanding, arrived at Pine Ridge. (At the Little Bighorn, in 1876, the Sioux had shot away half this regiment.) Capt. Allyn Capron and Light Battery E, First Artillery, accompanied the Seventh. At Rosebud Agency, four companies of the Twenty-first Infantry from Fort Sidney, Nebraska, joined Lieutenant Colonel Smith, and Lt. Col. J. A. Poland took command. Orders went to New Mexico for the Sixth Cavalry to rush north, and to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for a provisional squadron formed from several cavalry regiments. General Ruger alerted stations in Montana. Miles ordered the crack Cheyenne scout troop of Lt. E. W. Casey at Fort Keogh, Montana, to prepare for field service and authorized Brooke to recruit two troops of Indian scouts at Pine Ridge. By the 26th, forty progressive Oglalas and forty of Little Chief's Cheyennes had been enlisted.
Pine Ridge teemed with humanity—Oglalas, a few Wazhazhas from Pass Creek, soldiers, scouts, and newspapermen. The reporters crammed James A. Finley's tiny hotel to overflowing. They had rushed to the theater of war only to discover no war at all. Their editors demanded sensational stories, and they obliged. Lined up at the counter of James Asay's trading post, they invented lurid accounts of battle, massacre, and atrocity that delighted the folks back home. To relieve the boredom, they draped themselves with guns and ammunition belts, and posed for the photographers. "So far as my observation goes," wrote one, "there are but two correspondents here who are not round-shouldered because of the weapons and missiles they have to carry around."
General Brooke was not amused by the antics of the press and in fact went so far as to have Carl Smith of the Omaha _World-Herald_ recalled. Smith understood the Morse code and discovered that simply by hanging around the telegraph office in Rushville he could pirate official dispatches denied to his colleagues. Before long, Brooke had alienated most of the reporters. A rigid, austere, and somewhat unimaginative man, he did not, in contrast to Miles, make any effort to cultivate the press. The correspondents tried constantly to learn his plans, but he evaded their questions or bluntly refused to be interviewed. As time went on and the troops failed to move, the reporters grew increasingly critical of his management of the campaign and in their dispatches bitterly assailed him for appeasing the Indians.
But the general's position was in truth one of extreme delicacy. The Indians had accomplished for him his first task of separating "friendlies" from "hostiles" (a questionable term but nonetheless a convenient distinction). The demeanor of the latter was undeniably hostile, but threats and noisy belligerence did not give him the excuse to march forth and clean out their camp. This would mean war, which he had been instructed to avoid at all hazards. Yet he had to do something. He could not maintain a large army in indefinite idleness while waiting for the hostiles to make the first move. At the same time, given the unpredictable temper of the dancers, he had to step gingerly, for any step could crack the thin ice that separated peace from war. Under the circumstances there was only one course of action open to him—to try to coax the hostile leaders to come in and join the friendlies.
Brooke was on the point of sending a scout, Frank Merrivale, as emissary to the White Clay camp when, on November 23, a familiar figure showed up at Pine Ridge. Valentine T. McGillycuddy, bearing a commission of colonel in the South Dakota militia, rode in to investigate the situation for Governor Arthur C. Mellette. The Oglalas welcomed Wasicu Wakan, who in seven winters of contention had never summoned soldiers, and implored him to have the troops sent away. Promptly upon learning of Brooke's resolve to negotiate, McGillycuddy volunteered for the mission. But the general had received the flamboyant exagent with notable coolness and turned down the offer. He sent Merrivale, who returned to report that the dancers had fired over his head. McGillycuddy left in disgust.
A gap in the record leaves the student curious over what happened next. Probably Brooke had more success with other emissaries. The Pine Ridge troubles had attracted many old scouts to the Army payroll once more. They were chiefly mixed bloods who had lived in the years of peace with the Sioux and were well known to the dancers. Among those who turned up were "Young Nick" Janis, Sam Dion, Joseph Bisonette, Oliver Morisette, the three Shangreau brothers, the famous "Big Bat" and "Little Bat" (Baptiste Pourier and Baptiste Garnier), and Frank Grouard, Very likely, some of these scouts, together with the leaders of the friendly progressives camped at the agency, rode down White Clay Creek to reason with the dancers. The awesome mobilization of troops, also, cannot have failed to impress the rebels. Whatever the answer, Brooke reported on November 27 that two of the most recalcitrant chiefs, Little Wound and Big Road, had come in and that their bands were following.
But the fanatical Short Bull and Kicking Bear still held large numbers at the mouth of White Clay Creek, and the erratic Two Strike still hesitated on Wounded Knee Creek. What impelled them to the next move is not apparent; probably the fiery oratory of the prophets proved sufficient. On November 30 the two groups, now largely Brulés, broke camp. Two Strike's people marched down Wounded Knee Creek. En route they plundered the cabins of the friendlies who had gone to the agency, burned their hay, and appropriated their beef cattle. Crossing to the north bank of White River at the mouth of Grass Creek, the Two Strike people united with Short Bull's followers, who had abandoned the White Clay camp and traveled down White River, helping themselves to cattle from the agency herd camp across from the mouth of Willow Creek. The combined force, estimated Royer, numbered 500 lodges, perhaps 600 warriors. The frightened chief herder, whose herd had borne the brunt of the foraging expeditions, put the figure at 1,000 fighting men. They continued a short distance down the river, then turned northward.
A level, elevated plateau, now known as the Cuny Table, separated White River from Cheyenne River. Its sides rose precipitously several hundred feet above the prairie, and it offered few approaches. On its northeast edge the Cuny Table terminated in a curious geological formation—another small table, shaped roughly like a triangle, about three miles long and two wide. A narrow land bridge, scarcely wider than a wagon, linked it with the larger plateau to the south. The Indians called this small projection the Stronghold. Two springs yielded plenty of water, and a carpet of good grass provided forage for the stock. With the stolen beef, hunger was not an immediate problem. Here the dancers laid out their camp.
The Stronghold afforded a natural fortress that all Brooke's army would have difficulty taking by assault or siege. Surrounding themselves with pickets to give timely warning of enemy approach, the faithful threw themselves with renewed frenzy into a virtually continuous orgy of dancing.
To the division commander and his staff, gathered before the war map on the wall of Miles' office in Chicago, the policy of caution and conciliation at Pine Ridge seemed the best approach for the time being. No Indian village in history was free of quarreling factions. Delay would give the dancers a chance to start squabbling among themselves and also afford time for more troops to converge on the scene of the trouble. Brooke was growing impatient under the newspaper attacks, but Miles restrained him. Above all, he warned, "Do not allow your command to become mixed up with the Indians friendly or otherwise. Hold them at a safe distance." In subsequent messages, he reiterated this injunction. Mutual suspicion and one nervous trigger finger could touch off fighting that neither side wanted.
One measure under active consideration in Chicago was the arrest of the dance leaders. Now that the Army could make the arrests and also bear the brunt of any unhappy consequences or humanitarian outcry, the Indian Bureau thought this a fine idea. As early as November 20, Acting Commissioner Belt had instructed the Sioux agents to wire him the names of "fomentors of disturbances," in order that "assistance of the military while operating to suppress any attempted outbreak may be had to make arrests."
This request did not long await responses. All the agents promptly made recommendations, Royer alone submitting the names of sixty-five Indians who should be taken into custody. Belt consolidated the lists, and they were turned over to the War Department with the Secretary of the Interior's plea that soldiers seize the individuals named. Miles, too, believed that the troublemakers should be removed, but at Pine Ridge and Rosebud, even though the agents were anxious to get on with it, such a move at this time was fraught with explosive possibilities.
Standing Rock was another matter, for here McLaughlin still retained control. Miles believed Sitting Bull to be at the bottom of the whole trouble and wanted his influence neutralized as soon as possible. Yet, of all the agents, McLaughlin opposed immediate arrests. His list of candidates for military prison, submitted to the Indian Office for the third time on November 21, bore an important qualification: "Everything being quiet here at present with no snow and the weather summer-like, [I] do not think it prudent to make arrests now." He believed that the move should be deferred until the cold and snow had its usual enervating effect upon the Indians. Then, to avoid the turmoil that the appearance of soldiers would excite, Indian policemen should be used. General Ruger and Colonel Drum concurred, though not in writing.
General Miles had only contempt for Indian agents and was inclined to treat their ideas with scorn, if he noticed them at all. At a banquet on November 24 he encountered an old friend. As a scout, William F. Cody—Buffalo Bill—had shared the rigors of Miles' campaign against Sitting Bull in 1876. For a time Sitting Bull had been a featured attraction of Cody's famous Wild West show, and Miles let himself be convinced that, if anyone could capture the Hunkpapa leader, Cody was the man. The general supplied him with an order for the arrest of Sitting Bull and on the back of a calling card scrawled instructions for military commanders to supply such transportation and escorts as Cody might request. The old scout promptly hopped a train for St. Paul and Bismarck.
Pausing in Wisconsin to pick up three companions—Frank Powell (White Beaver), Robert H. Haslam (Pony Bob), and G. W. Chadwick—Buffalo Bill showed up at Standing Rock on the evening of November 27 trailing these men and five newspaper reporters. Still attired in dress suit, silk stockings, and patent leather shoes, he presented his credentials to a chagrined McLaughlin. During this same night, McLaughlin's agent at Grand River, schoolteacher John M. Carignan, reported by letter that the Indians were quieter and if only left alone would probably make no trouble. Above all, he advised, keep all strangers away.
Convinced that if Cody tried to carry out his mission, he might get himself killed and precipitate an outbreak as well, McLaughlin and Colonel Drum acted quickly. The officers at Fort Yates conspired to lull the great scout and showman with the pleasures of the post officers' club, while the agent dashed off a telegram to Washington pleading that Miles' order be rescinded. But Cody's capacity was already legend. Late next morning he walked out of the club, apparently no worse for the night, and prepared to ride for Grand River.
McLaughlin and Drum had foreseen this possibility, and what happened next they had carefully arranged through fast-riding couriers who left Standing Rock during the night. That day, November 28, Cody and his entourage journeyed twenty miles in the direction of Grand River, camping for the night where the Sitting Bull Road crossed Oak Creek. Early next morning, Louis Primeau, returning from Grand River, rode into this camp and asked where Cody was going. When informed, he replied: "Well, you're too late. Sitting Bull has gone into the agency with Jack Carignan. They went over the other trail." The other trail was called Primeau's Road, and it crossed Oak Creek two miles upstream. Cody expressed disbelief, and Primeau suggested that he ride over and check the other road for tracks. One horse was shod, the other unshod, and they were drawing a buggy. On the Primeau road, of course, Cody found the carefully planted trail of the horses and buggy and, crestfallen, returned to the agency.
There he discovered that he had been victimized. But there, too, McLaughlin showed him a telegram that Colonel Drum had received from department headquarters four hours after Cody's departure. Receiving McLaughlin's urgent wire, the Secretary of the Interior had hastened to President Harrison and Secretary of War Proctor. As a result of the conference, the President had suspended Cody's orders and deferred all attempts to arrest Sitting Bull. Confronted with evidence of this decision, there was nothing for Cody to do but leave Standing Rock. He returned to Chicago, submitted a bill for $505.60 to cover transportation for himself and three associates, and retired to his home at North Platte, Nebraska, to recover from a severe cold—the result, perhaps, of a forty-mile horseback ride in banquet-hall attire.
Miles was furious over the interference of the upstart agent, and knowledge that somehow Colonel Drum had conspired to thwart the desires of the division commander did not abate his anger. Since he could not learn the particulars, he contented himself with rapping Drum's knuckles. "If reports are correct," his adjutant general wrote General Ruger confidentially, "the Division Commander is not entirely satisfied with the action of the military at Fort Yates." The episode, moreover, led the President himself to review the whole question of arrests. While leaving the timing of future arrests to Miles' discretion, he cautioned that "they ought not to be made until there is the amplest preparations to suppress any outbreak that might result."
The Cody episode strengthened Miles' conviction that the agents must be brushed aside. The very day the President canceled Cody's authority to arrest Sitting Bull, Miles expressed this conviction in writing. A lasting resolution of the Sioux problem, he informed his superiors, depended entirely upon placing the Sioux "under absolute control and beyond the possibility of doing harm." The agents could not do this. The only answer was to put "those large powerful warlike tribes, that have been for years a terror to the north-west States and Territories, entirely under military control, and at once." He also staunchly advocated another measure. The ration allowance prescribed by treaty should be granted at once. The Sioux were starving, and full stomachs would go a long way toward restoring contentment on the reservations.
On November 28 the general boarded a train for Washington to sell his ideas in person. Possibly with a shrewd appraisal of the effect of public opinion on the outcome of his efforts, he suddenly began to emit declarations of alarm. At trainside in Chicago he told reporters that the situation was grave. "In fact, the necessity for a winter campaign is becoming more and more apparent." At the Ebbit House in Washington he told reporters, "It is a more comprehensive plot than anything ever inspired by Tecumseh, or even Pontiac." In interviews with the press he made much of the necessity for military control of the agencies and restoration of full rations. Thus he drew in public the battle lines of an interdepartmental war. Officials of the Indian Bureau had never let themselves be entirely convinced that the Sioux were starving, and instead of shifting the blame to the House of Representatives, where it properly belonged, Acting Commissioner Belt branded Miles' statements "exaggerated and unfounded." If the Sioux were hungry, he declared, it was because of their own improvidence. The Indian authorities also girded for battle over the military attempt to encroach on the prerogatives of their agents, and Commissioner Morgan opportunely returned to Washington to organize the defense.
Congress had just convened when Miles reached Washington, and the Capitol chambers provided an admirable sounding board for his pronouncements, many of which were quoted on the Senate and House floors. The immediate issue was a bill to provide Federal arms and ammunition to the terrified settlers of the Northwest. But on December 3 Senator Daniel Voorhees, the "Tall Sycamore of the Wabash," rose from his desk and in ringing tones declared:
I look upon the policy which has been pursued by the administration of Indian affairs as a crime revolting to man and God. I look upon the present outbreak or threatened outbreak—which will bring not merely the destruction of the Indians, but will bathe the snows of the Northwest crimson with the blood of our own brave soldiers and officers—as something revolting in the extreme, and that instead of sitting here debating Election bills and Force bills, and providing for the issuance of arms to the States in the Northwest, we should be hurrying, anxiously and eagerly, to provide for the feeding of these starving people.
"The speech," reported the _New York Herald_ , "created a sensation." At the same time, a bill to appropriate money for rations languished in the House while the people of the Northwest got their arms—1,000 stand each for Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. But Miles had his way. On December 1 the Secretary of the Interior ordered the Sioux agents to spend money earmarked for the remainder of the fiscal year in order to bring ration issues, for the time being at least, to the level set by treaty. On the same day he awarded Miles partial victory on the other proposal, ordering the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to wire the Sioux agents that "as to all operations intended to suppress any outbreak by force, [you will] cooperate with and obey the orders of the military officer commanding on the reservation in your charge."
The contest between the Interior and War Departments was far from over. Miles had merely won the first round. Nor were the gathering clouds of bureaucratic strife strictly interdepartmental. There were rumblings in Miles' own camp. For many years Army cohesion had been rent by factional bickering. Constellations of lesser officers had clustered around two bright stars, Crook and Miles. The two generals had differed fundamentally on how best to handle the Indian problem. The difference in philosophies and techniques was as deep and irreconcilable as the difference in personalities. The death of Crook had not healed the wounds, for his protégés were scattered throughout the Army hierarchy. Miles' militant utterances to the press, so much in contrast to the unpretentious manner of Crook, annoyed many important officers.
No sooner had troops reached Pine Ridge than the Washington _Evening Star_ quoted "a prominent army officer" stationed in the Capital as saying:
Miles is predicting a general Indian war and virtually asks that the command of the entire army be turned over to him. He wants to create a scare and pose as the savior of the country. In fact he is almost in the attitude of a political Messiah, such as the Indians themselves are looking for. I have no doubt in the world that he is honest in his candidacy. He has shrewdly enlisted the favor of nearly every newspaper man in California, and has by his agreeable manners and the expenditure of his means managed to make himself very popular in a certain way in the west. He is one of the most ambitious men in the army and he is pulling his wires shrewdly.
Miles clipped out the article and sent it to General Schofield, asking that the author of this "malicious and unwarranted attack" be identified, arrested, and hauled before a military tribunal. The handling of the protest had its comic aspects. Schofield endorsed it to the Secretary of War "with recommendation that necessary steps be taken to ascertain the identity of the 'prominent officer.' "Proctor endorsed it back to Schofield "for information as to what proof can be furnished in regard to the identity of the prominent officer." Schofield endorsed it back to Miles "for any information he may have to communicate." Miles endorsed it once more to Schofield with the comment that had such an offense occurred in his headquarters, he would have felt an obligation to find out who did it and take action. Here rested the case of the "prominent officer."
That more than one prominent officer entertained such beliefs was revealed by a published interview with Brig. Gen. Wesley Merritt, an old Indian fighter scarcely less distinguished than Miles. "A man like General Crook would not have called all the troops, from the South in an emergency of this kind," he told a correspondent for the _Army and Navy Journal_ , "and he would have been pretty apt to have been master of the situation.... It is pretty well understood in Army circles that private ambitions have had more or less to do with the present Indian situation." "Remember that I do not join in this criticism," he added disarmingly. "I have no insinuations to make concerning that mischievous little insect sometimes called the 'Presidential bee.' "
Such criticism was grossly unjust. Although Miles was hardly above exploiting the situation for personal advantage, he certainly had nothing to do with creating it. As it turned out, moreover, he handled it brilliantly. To his credit, he refrained from engaging in a public brawl with his detractors. Besides, upon his return from Washington on December 3, the management of field operations absorbed most of his time and attention.
The two small reservations of Crow Creek and Lower Brulé, separated by the Missouri River but administered by the same agent, had thus far escaped the Ghost Dance infection. The Lower Yanktonais at Crow Creek, on the east bank, had long since been made over in the white image, and they scorned the doctrine. The Lower Brulés, though far more docile than their kinsmen of Rosebud, had yet to be reconstructed. They were unhappy over the boundaries drawn for them by the land agreement and incensed at Commissioner Morgan's obstinate refusal to let them move down to Rosebud and live with the Upper Brulés. The Ghost Dance emissaries from Cheyenne River who came among them late in November found some willing pupils.
On November 27 Agent A. P. Dixon learned that a dance had been organized on his reservation. A man of action, he marched out of the agency the next day at the head of his police force. By evening he had nine dance leaders packed in the agency jail and was complaining to Washington that he needed more prison facilities. In the next few days the number of arrests rose to twenty-two. Soldiers came to take seventeen of the prisoners to Fort Snelling, Minnesota, for confinement in the military prison there. Alarmed at Dixon's initiative in a matter the Interior Department preferred to leave strictly to the Army, Belt quickly clamped down. On December 6 he telegraphed, "Secretary directs that you make no more arrests whatever except under orders of the military or upon an order of the Secretary of the Interior." But the agent's prompt and decisive action had already won the day, and the Ghost Dance movement on the Lower Brulé Reservation collapsed.
With Kicking Bear in the Stronghold, the Miniconjou dancers of Cheyenne River Reservation looked for leadership to Hump and Big Foot. The bands of these chiefs had united in one great conclave on Cheyenne River near the mouth of Cherry Creek. About 600 people kept a dance in progress almost continuously. Residents of the newly founded town of Cheyenne City, less than twenty settlers, cowered in their rude homes on the ceded tract across the river. The mixed-blood agency farmer, Narcisse Narcelle, worked tirelessly at the perilous task of trying to talk the dancers into giving up the foolishness. Hump was already wavering in his belief. Not the unyielding Big Foot, who in council on November 25 urged his people to acquire all the guns and cartridges they could find and stay together in one camp. Friendly Indians told Agent Palmer, who visited the Cherry Creek camps on November 27, that the dancers were spoiling for a fight and intended to have one soon. They also warned Palmer that white traders were furnishing the recalcitrants with rifles.
General Miles thought chances good of detaching Hump from the disaffected and thereby considerably shrinking the size of the Cherry Creek dance center. Hump had surrendered to Miles in 1877, had guided him to Lame Deer's hostile village, and had served him faithfully as a scout in the Nez Percé war of 1877. For seven years he and other recent hostiles were in the charge of one of Miles' officers, Capt. Ezra P. Ewers. Between Hump and the captain had grown a bond of mutual trust and friendship that Miles believed might now be turned to good advantage. On November 28, as Miles left for Washington, orders sped to the Department of Texas for Captain Ewers to hasten to Fort Bennett. On December 4 Miles sent instructions to him at Pierre, South Dakota. Ewers was to go to Hump, recall old times, tell him that Miles now had charge of all the Sioux and Cheyennes, and ask him to give up the Ghost Dance and come to the agency.
Accompanied only by Lt. Harry C. Hale, Captain Ewers rode up Cheyenne River to the Cherry Creek camp. Hump was absent, but a runner was sent for him. Learning that his old friend wished to see him, Hump at once returned to camp. Aided by Hale and Farmer Narcelle, the captain went to work. Informed that Miles wanted him to take his people away from the dancers and come to Fort Bennett, Hump replied that he would do as General Miles desired. With a large share of his band, Hump arrived at Cheyenne River Agency on December 9. He once more donned the uniform of an Army scout and thereafter, under the watchful eyes of Captain Ewers, threw his influence against the Ghost Dance.
With the defection of Hump the ardor of Big Foot cooled considerably, and he took his people home to their cabins at the mouth of Deep Creek, ten miles below the forks of Cheyenne River. Already he was boxed by troops. To the east, Col. H. C. Merriam and the Seventh Infantry reached Fort Sully on December 7 and prepared to cross the Missouri for a march up Cheyenne River. To the west, Captain Henissee's "camp of observation" had stood near the forks of Cheyenne River since spring. It was now manned by Troops C, D, and I, Eighth Cavalry, Company I, Third Infantry, and two Hotchkiss guns, Lt. Col. Edwin V. Sumner commanding. On December 15 another company of infantry and a detachment of Indian scouts strengthened the command.
Parleying with Sumner, Big Foot professed peaceful intentions. Sumner's judgment that he told the truth seems correct. But the militance of his followers had not abated. The tragedy of Big Foot was to repeat a theme familiar in the history of the Indian wars—a chief hurried unwillingly toward disaster by fiery young men he could not control.
At Rosebud all was serene. With the Brulé dancers absent in the Stronghold, only progressives remained at the agency. At Reynolds' summons, they had moved there and laid out an immense temporary encampment. Aside from the routine of bivouac, Colonel Poland's troops had nothing to do but shiver in their tents.
On December 1 George Wright turned up at the agency. He had cleared himself of the charges brought in September by Inspector Cisney and now resumed his old job. Special Agent Reynolds stayed on to help. A welcoming committee of progressive headmen filed into the office to assure Wright of their peaceful feelings. They castigated the Brulés in the Stronghold for bringing calamity upon the Sioux and promised to heed any advice the agent might offer. Only please, they begged, do not let the dreaded bluecoats harm them. Wright quieted their fears and on December 5 wrote Commissioner Morgan, now back from his trip to the Southwest, that "all Indians remaining on the Agency are quiet and will remain so."
The issue now hung on the outcome of General Brooke's efforts at the storm center, and all eyes focused on Pine Ridge.
## _8. BROOKE TRIES FOR PEACE_
PINE RIDGE AGENCY occupied a low plateau formed by the junction of Wolf and White Clay Creeks. The road running south to Rushville divided the village into commercial and official districts. East of the road stood the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches with their parsonages, three trading posts, and the low log structure that the correspondents dubbed the "Hotel de Finley." West of the Rushville road stood the agency buildings—shops, warehouses, a day school and the rambling 180-pupil boarding school; employee apartments; the long edifice that housed the council room and offices of the agent, chief clerk, and police; and the modest dwelling of Agent Royer, which General Brooke now claimed as his headquarters. Scattered around the fringes of the hamlet were cabins of the half-breeds.
Directly west of the agency, along both sides of White Clay Creek, the cabins of Red Cloud's band clustered around the empty two-story frame house the Government had built for the old chief. Red Shirt's settlement sprawled along the valley a short distance to the south. The tent city of Brooke's soldiers, now housing more than a thousand men, separated the agency from the friendly camps.
Hotchkiss and Gatling guns commanded every approach to the agency. One of the guns frowned upon the camp of old Blue Horse, who resented the implication. "There is no trouble at my camp," he complained, "and it might go off and hurt someone." Brooke declined to turn it in another direction.
The defection from the dance ranks of Little Wound, Big Road, and their followers swelled the Oglala camps around the agency. Many of these people still counted themselves adherents of the Ghost Dance religion but had come in rather than face the probable consequences of Short Bull's provocative policies. Brooke had all those who professed belief in the religion camp apart from the nonbelievers, and the "hostile" camps of these people littered the valley south of the agency.
At one such camp on November 30 the dancers tried a deadly experiment. An Oglala named Porcupine volunteered to test the bulletproof qualities of the Ghost Shirt and ended with a nearly fatal wound in his thigh. News of the episode spread through the camps with faith-shattering effect.
With only a few Oglalas in the Stronghold, nearly all the Pine Ridge people were gathered at the agency. Including the bands of Red Cloud and Red Shirt, there were more than 4,000 Indians. They were restless, suspicious, and afraid, but seemingly determined to do nothing that might anger the soldiers.
In this determination the enfeebled Red Cloud shared. So consistently had he opposed the reforms of past years, however, that many automatically suspected him of complicity in the rebellion, a suspicion that the reporters were not slow in passing on to their editors. "Some of these gentlemen," wrote scout James H. Cook, "informed me that old Red Cloud was at the bottom of all the deviltry that was going on; that he was managing the hostiles who were out in the bad lands, making his headquarters at the fine house which Uncle Sam had so kindly given him in order to make him comfortable in his old age." But neither Cook nor his associates among the scouts "could ever discover that old Red Cloud had anything to do with either directing the hostiles or giving them aid and encouragement." Royer, too, could find "no evidence that goes to show that he is connected with the Ghost Dance, and... he has given me no trouble of any character." All the creditable evidence supports Red Cloud's own assertion that "so far as the dance is concerned I can truly say that I never had anything to do with or encourage it, never having seen one."
For Brooke, the Brulés in the Stronghold caused greater concern. The first reports of the flight from the White Clay camp had alarmed the general, for they raised the fear that the fugitives were making a break for Canada, thus endangering the Black Hills settlements, especially Rapid City. Had the Brulés in fact wished to go north, they probably could have slipped with little difficulty around the troops stationed at the forks of Cheyenne River. By the end of the first week in December, however, the escape paths to the north had been covered. The Fort Leavenworth Cavalry Squadron (one troop each from the First, Second, Fifth, and Ninth Regiments), under Lt. Col. George B. Sanford, took post along the left bank of Cheyenne River immediately northwest of the stronghold. The Sixth Cavalry, Col. Eugene A. Carr commanding, patrolled east and west from a base camp at the mouth of Rapid Creek. Farther north, units from Montana forts scouted the country south of the Northern Pacific Railroad.
Word from the Stronghold soon made it clear that Short Bull and his associates had no intention of going north or in any other direction. They planned to stay where they were, dance all winter, and in the spring decide upon the next move. They made it equally clear that they would fight to the last if the Army tried to take their badlands refuge. In their present temper, Brooke believed, they meant precisely what they said. He therefore stepped up his diplomatic assault.
Several large parties of friendlies rode to the Stronghold to try persuasion but turned back when the pickets fired over their heads. Then the thought occurred to Brooke that perhaps Father John Jutz could talk his way into the Brulé camp. The seventy-year-old Catholic missionary had come to Pine Ridge in 1888 to establish the Holy Rosary Mission and School, four miles north of the agency. Staffed by Franciscan Sisters from Buffalo, New York, and supervised by the kindly old priest, the mission had prospered, and its founder had won a secure place in the affections of the Indians. They had assured him that, if war came, his mission and all who sought refuge in it would not be harmed. Father Jutz believed that the rebels would receive him and responded eagerly to Brooke's proposal.
Accompanied by Jack Red Cloud, himself recently a dance leader, Father Jutz left the agency at noon on December 3. The next day, ten miles short of their destination, they ran into the line of pickets that curved around the tableland escarpment. Couriers galloped back to the dance camp and soon returned with orders for the pickets to admit the Father. By 11:00 P.M. the two emissaries were at Short Bull's headquarters.
For most of the night Father Jutz sat through a seemingly endless council. Present were Short Bull, Kicking Bear, Two Strike, Turning Bear, High Hawk, Crow Dog, Eagle Pipe, and several others. The Sioux leaders dwelt at great length on their grievances. They expressed particular anger over Census Agent Lea's enumeration at Rosebud, which had cut 2,000 from the population total. It was false and would not give them enough food to live on. The new boundary between Rosebud and Pine Ridge was also a source of discontent. Jutz' plea that they surrender fell on deaf ears. The name of every headman present was on someone's list of Indians who should be arrested, and they vowed to die fighting rather than be locked in the white man's big iron house. By daybreak, however, Jutz had persuaded several of the leaders to come in for a talk with General Brooke, and they set forth almost immediately.
The delegation consisted of Two Strike, Turning Bear, Big Turkey, High Pine, Big-Bad-Horse, and Bull Dog, together with an escort of twenty-four armed warriors. War paint smeared their faces and arms, and tufts of sacred eagle feathers fluttered from the hair of the riders and the manes and tails of the ponies. Some of the men wore Ghost Shirts. The Indians did not feel so brave as the defiant trappings suggested. They feared that the invitation to parley was really part of a plot to arrest them. Outriders preceded the advance, and the most trivial occurrence threw the column into confusion.
The group camped for the night of December 5 at Father Jutz' mission and the next morning, shorn of paint and feathers and bearing a white flag, moved hesitantly toward the agency. Preceded by the mounted warriors, Two Strike rode with Father Jutz in a buggy. Four times the procession faltered as fear asserted itself. Finally, Father Jutz promised that the warriors could kill him if the soldiers made any menacing move, and the cavalcade marched into the agency. At Brooke's headquarters the Indians dismounted with military precision. The chiefs tied their mounts to the hitching rail and with studied dignity filed into the general's presence behind Father Jutz.
After such a colorful entry, the conference was something of an anticlimax. Flanked by Colonels Wheaton and Forsyth, Brooke sat facing the semicircle of chiefs. For two hours they debated, the general urging surrender, the chiefs responding with long discourses on the iniquities of the white man. To most of their complaints, Brooke replied that there would be plenty of time to adjust grievances after the refugees had come to the agency. As added inducement, however, he promised to provide abundant food and to employ some of the young men as scouts.
Turning Bear answered for the Indians. He did not see how the soldier chief could hire men as scouts when there was no enemy to watch, but all the same they would be happy to be paid for it. As for coming to the agency, they would have to give this matter long and careful thought. For one thing, there was not enough grass and water for their ponies. (This was true; the 5,000 people already at Pine Ridge had seen to that.) For another, even if they did decide to come in, it would take a long time. The old men and women had no ponies to ride; nor were there enough to pull the wagons. Shifting finally to a happier topic, Turning Bear hoped in conclusion that the delegates would be given something to eat before beginning the long journey back to the Stronghold. Brooke consented, and all moved over to the warehouse for a grand feast and, for entertainment, a squaw dance.
General Brooke interpreted Turning Bear's remarks rather more optimistically than the facts warranted. "The result of the council," he wired Miles, "is that they will come in and camp near here at such points as may be agreed upon.... The prospect is that trouble with the Indians is in a fair way to speedy settlement." Brooke was elated with the day's work and was more than a little chagrined to learn Miles' reaction: "The Division Commander," telegraphed the assistant adjutant general, "directs me to say that he deprecates any extended council with the hostiles further than to give them to understand that your orders and instructions are to be obeyed implicity. After they do so there will be ample time and opportunity given them to make known any grievances or ask favors."
Brooke was hurt and annoyed. Slightly misrepresenting the situation, he replied that "there was no talk of grievances; the Indians wanted to know my wishes which they heard and promised to obey." But when Miles read the newspapers next day, December 7, he was even more certain that the negotiations had been mismanaged. Again he telegraphed Brooke. The press dispatches, he said, "seemed to indicate that you were not master of the situation at that place." If the newspapers were correct, Brooke had promised food and jobs but said nothing about the depredations committed against the property of the friendlies, nothing about the theft of government beef from the herd camp, and nothing about the necessity for the rebels subordinating themselves absolutely to the authority of the Government. "I must call your attention," he emphasized, "to my original order not to allow the command to be mixed up with the Indians in any way or to be taken at disadvantage. This will apply not only in a military sense but in a diplomatic." Brooke protested, and Miles, having made his point, soothed the injured pride. Then he began laying plans to go to Dakota himself and exercise closer control of the situation.
Brooke had not, as he thought, persuaded the Two Strike people to surrender, but he had started them thinking about the comforts of the agency. When the chiefs left Pine Ridge for the journey back to the Stronghold, Louis Shangreau, a half-breed scout, and thirty-two friendlies went along, apparently to gain information and if possible to talk with the other hostiles.
At the Stronghold camp, Shangreau and his escort found a Ghost Dance in full swing. The Indians refused to suspend it even long enough to hold a council, and it continued with unabated fury for thirty hours. Then Short Bull called an intermission to hear what Shangreau had to say. The scout made a strong plea for the dancers to surrender. "The agent would forgive you if you would return now and would give you more rations," he told them, "but [would] not permit you to dance." Crow Dog spoke up in opposition to accepting the proposal. So did Two Strike. In his absence, several warriors of his band had visited a trader's store on Cheyenne River. A group of cowboys, trigger happy or simply scared, opened fire on the Indians and killed one. The episode weakened whatever hold Brooke's arguments had gained on the mind of the old chief. Short Bull delivered the answer:
I have risen to-day to tell you something of importance. You have heard the words of the brothers from the agency camps, and if you have done as myself you have weighed them carefully. If the Great Father would permit us to continue the dance, would give more rations, and quit taking away portions of the reservation, I would be in favor of returning. But even if you [turning to Shangreau] say that he will, how can we discern whether you are telling the truth? We have been lied to so many times that we will not believe any words that your agent sends us. If we return he will take away our guns and ponies, put some of us in jail for stealing cattle and plundering houses [all of which was probably true]. We prefer to stay here and die, if necessary, to loss of liberty. We are free now and have plenty of beef, can dance all the time in obedience to the command of Great Wakantanka. We tell you to return to your agent and say to him that the Dakotas in the Bad Lands are not going to come in.
The dance resumed, and for two days Shangreau could not get it stopped for another council, although it is likely that he used the time advantageously to work on individuals. At noon on the third day, probably December 10, the headmen sat down for another talk. Old Two Strike suddenly rose and, inexplicably reversing his earlier stand, announced that he had decided to take his people to the agency. Crow Dog stood up and declared that he, too, believed the time had come to surrender. Shangreau had driven the fatal wedge in the unity of the chiefs, but he had not reckoned on the fanaticism of Short Bull. The apostle sprang to his feet and shouted, "At such a time as this we should all stick together like brothers. Do not leave; remain with us. These men from the agency are not telling the truth; they will conduct you back to the agency and place you in jail there. Louis is at the bottom of this affair. I know he is a traitor; kill him, kill him!"
Some of Short Bull's warriors clubbed their Winchesters and rushed at Shangreau. The friendlies formed a screen around the scout, and Two Strike's men hastened to the rescue. Instantly the village was a scene of brawling chaos. It had happened before. Many times in past years factional quarrels within a band had exploded in a paroxysm of brief but bloody violence. The pandemonium that now reigned in the Stronghold followed the pattern of past affairs. Mounted and afoot, the warriors raced to and fro, yelling, charging, firing arrows and rifles, swinging clubs. Several went down, dead or wounded. Suddenly Crow Dog— murderer of Spotted Tail, opportunist, master diplomat and dramatist—sat down in the midst of the turmoil and drew his blanket over his head. The din gradually subsided and all eyes turned on the shrouded figure. When the silence was complete, Crow Dog cried out that he could not bear to see Sioux shed their own blood. Then, slowly rising, he announced, "I am going back to White Clay [Pine Ridge]; you can kill me if you want to, now, and prevent my starting. The agent's words are true, and it is better to return than to stay here. I am not afraid to die."
Crow Dog's dramatic intervention restored order. The proponents of peace, now numbering well over half the camp, struck their tepees, loaded their wagons, and set forth with Shangreau and the friendlies on the journey to the agency. This was too much for the dance faction. The defectors had gone only two miles when the rest of the Brulés, having struck camp also, caught up and joined the cavalcade. Plodding along on their ponies, however, Short Bull and Kicking Bear were seized with visions of military prison. Four miles later, they and about 200 die-hards again changed their minds and turned back to the Stronghold.
A courier brought word of Shangreau's triumph to Brooke on the morning of December 11, and joyfully he telegraphed Miles the good news. There was now nothing to be done but wait for the Two Strike Brulés to make their tedious way to the agency and hope that they suffered no second thoughts en route. Then the matter of Short Bull and Kicking Bear could be reconsidered.
Brooke's policy of conciliation seemed to be achieving good results, but this did not mollify the correspondents who had come to report a war, and their dispatches condemned him with increasing bitterness. The settlers around the reservation also grew loud in their denunciation of his reluctance to force the issue. Although Brooke would not unleash the regulars, the sixty-two ranchers and cowboys mustered by Col. H. M. Day into the South Dakota militia were spoiling for a fight. Patrolling Cheyenne River on the eastern flank of the Black Hills, they skirmished with the warriors who had returned to the Stronghold after the defection of Two Strike. During the week of December 14, Day's command collided four times with parties of Indians. On the 15th, eighteen of the militiamen crossed the Cheyenne and rode up Battle Creek Draw toward the Stronghold. The Sioux came out in force and drove the intruders back across the river. In another clash, at Phinney's Ranch, between Spring and Battle Creeks, Day and ten men stood off a party of Sioux for four hours. The Indians set fire to the corral and, while the whites fought it, ignited the prairie, too. A fortunate shift in the wind saved the defenders, and the warriors withdrew.
On the 12th, one of the reporters, Will Cressey of the Omaha _Bee_ , saw some action. George Cosgrove, a rancher, and twelve cowboys rode into Day's camp to report that a party of Sioux had been seen near Daly's Ranch, at the mouth of Battle Creek, and declared their intention to return to the ranch and lie in ambush. Cressey went along. The cowboys posted themselves behind a woodpile at Daly's Ranch and waited. In half an hour the Indians approached the ranch. One started to ride through the gate, and a cowboy, Fred Thompson, fired. The warrior fell to the ground, and his pony galloped into a nearby field. The other whites instantly poured a volley into the rest of the Indians, and two more were seen to fall from their mounts. The two sides then exchanged fire until nightfall, with two further casualties among the Indians and one cowboy seriously wounded in the shoulder. As the Indians were withdrawing, Colonel Day and two more men rode up and exchanged shots with the departing Sioux.
In Chicago, General Miles prepared to take the field. Before leaving, however, he fired another salvo at the Interior Department. Secretary Noble's order of December 1 merely subordinated the agents to the Army commanders on each reservation in strictly military matters. This was not enough for Miles. Much had been accomplished in Dakota, he wrote his superiors, but the problem had by no means been solved, "and will not in my opinion until action is taken, placing the Sioux nation of five [actually seven] different tribes, together with the Cheyenne tribe under such control and government as to make them cease to desire war, and make it impracticable for them ever to resume hostilities with any hope of success." The solution was obvious: "Nothing but the firm strong arm of the military power can govern them. This will be necessary for several months, if not for a term of years." To avoid division of authority and such "interference with the plans of the military as there has been recently"—a slap at McLaughlin—Miles would replace the civil agents with Army officers backed by a strong force of troops at each agency. These officers, whom he recommended by name, had more than twenty-five years of service each, long experience on the frontier, and outstanding records of Indian management. Dropping his plan in the mail, Miles boarded a train for Dakota. He intended to make his headquarters, for the time being, at Rapid City, on the eastern edge of the Black Hills.
Rattling across the barren prairies of northern Nebraska, Miles received progress reports from Pine Ridge. With Two Strike coming in, Brooke was confident that no more Indians could be detached from the recalcitrants through diplomacy. It now remained to clean out the hostile camp by force. He proposed to have Carr and the Sixth Cavalry move down from Rapid Creek and blockade all escape routes north of the Stronghold, while Brooke himself led the force at Pine Ridge in an assault on the fortress-like table from the south. Miles disliked the idea. He scribbled a reply and handed it to the telegraph operator when the train paused at Long Pine, Nebraska. "You may be sure those Indians will not stand a fight with any such force," he informed Brooke, "but would slip out through some pass as they have done many times leaving all the troops far in the rear." Instead, Miles believed that the cavalry should be deployed in three strong columns around the tableland to bottle up the rebels and hold them until winter closed down in earnest. Then, with cold and snow enervating Indians and ponies alike, the troops could much more readily march in and make short work of any opposition that developed.
Brooke was inclined to debate the point, but once more the spotlight suddenly shifted to Standing Rock. On December 15, as the first elements of Two Strike's caravan began straggling into Pine Ridge Agency (the rest arrived on the 16th, for a total of 900 Brulés in 184 lodges), Indian policemen rode into the Grand River settlement with orders to arrest Sitting Bull.
## _9. THE END OF SITTING BULL_
JAMES MCLAUGHLIN believed that if the Standing Rock Indians were to continue their march toward civilization, Sitting Bull and a few other leaders with similar reactionary tendencies would have to be removed from the reservation. The old chief's role in the Ghost Dance only gave the inevitable task a certain immediacy. Now the arrest would have to be accomplished before spring, when the dancers, daily anticipating the prophesied millennium, would rise to new heights of emotionalism, and when Sitting Bull's presence in their midst would be most incendiary. In the balmy November of 1890, however, the arrest was not of compelling urgency; in fact, in McLaughlin's view, delay was essential. Deep snow and freezing temperature vastly extended the limit of provocation Indians would endure when resistance involved the certainty of winter warfare.
McLaughlin desired carte blanche to deal with the matter when and how he saw fit. He felt confident of his ability to confine the Ghost Dance to the Grand River camps throughout the winter. He would wait until the weather became severe, then, on a day of his own selection, send his policemen to Grand River to make the arrest. Meanwhile, as proposed to the Indian Office on November 19, he would open an offensive on the Ghost Dance by cutting off rations to all who refused to admit the error of their ways.
The Indian Bureau did not sanction the plan to withhold rations—in fact, did not even reply to the proposal. And the Army upset the plan for arresting Sitting Bull at a time chosen by McLaughlin.
The President's directive of November 13 assigned the War Department responsibility for suppressing any outbreak among the Sioux. McLaughlin seems to have regarded this as designed chiefly to meet exigencies on the other Sioux reservations and as applying to Standing Rock only in a formal sense. General Ruger and Colonel Drum apparently shared this view, and were inclined to let the agent have a free hand. But General Miles plainly felt otherwise, and in sending Buffalo Bill to arrest Sitting Bull he had announced his own assumption that military authority extended to Standing Rock as well. The assumption gained added force on December 1 when McLaughlin, together with the other Sioux agents, received instructions to "cooperate with and obey the orders of the military officer commanding on the reservation in your charge," instructions that Miles had gone to Washington to advocate.
Nor did the general concur in McLaughlin's desire for delay. He had reports (almost certainly erroneous) that Sitting Bull was caching arms and attempting to unite all the tribes of the Northwest in a grand alliance to make war on the whites, and Miles regarded his imprisonment as a matter of utmost urgency. The abortive Cody mission broadcast Miles' intentions and in his view made a prompt arrest all the more imperative.
Two fears now haunted the Standing Rock agent. The first was that Miles, who made little effort to conceal his hostility toward McLaughlin, would again order the arrest of Sitting Bull without consulting the authorities on the scene and thus choose an inopportune time. From a desk in Chicago, the weather and the temper of Sitting Bull's followers could hardly be gauged with any degree of accuracy. The second and stronger fear was that the general would insist on the soldiers at Fort Yates, rather than the Indian police, making the arrest. Since the arrival of troops at Pine Ridge on November 20, countless rumors of military movements or intended movements had swept the Grand River settlements. The dancers were so wrought up that the mere appearance of bluecoats, regardless of their mission, would in McLaughlin's opinion touch off fighting. Moreover, Sitting Bull's spies kept Fort Yates under constant surveillance, ready to speed warning to him if troops marched in the direction of Grand River, while McLaughlin could have sufficient men in place at any time simply by augmenting the police detachment already stationed in the Grand River district.
In the early days of December, McLaughlin and Drum discussed the problem and agreed upon a course of action. McLaughlin would move the Grand River police into the Sitting Bull settlement at dawn on one of the biweekly ration days, when most of the Indians would be at the agency. Under cover of night, Drum would send a command from Fort Yates to take station within supporting distance. The police would make the arrest, and if anything went wrong the troops would charge to the rescue. As their carefully laid plans might be upset at any moment by General Miles, the two officials immediately and quietly determined to seize the first good opportunity.
Colonel Drum's command consisted of Troops F and G, Eighth Cavalry, and Companies G and H of his own regiment, the Twelfth Infantry. He assigned the supporting mission to the cavalry and briefed Capt. E. G. Fechet and his officers on what was intended. Detachments were designated and drilled in operation of the Hotchkiss and Gatling guns. Rations, grain, extra ammunition, buffalo overcoats, and horse covers were packed and set aside, ready for instant loading into the spring escort wagon and ambulance that were to accompany the command.
McLaughlin promptly strengthened the Grand River force. For several weeks the police had been hauling logs with which to build a halfway shelter where the road from Standing Rock to Grand River crossed Oak Creek. McLaughlin used this project as a pretext for assigning additional policemen to the district. He soon had twenty-one on duty, under Lieutenant Afraid-of-Bear, better known as Bull Head, and Sergeant Shave Head.
Bull Head lived three miles west of Sitting Bull's camp, on the south side of Grand River. A fine specimen of Indian manhood, he was courageous, resourceful, and completely devoted to McLaughlin. Shave Head, too, was thoroughly dependable and had made a big name by killing a bully named Red Thunder. Bull Head took his assignment all the more seriously for personal reasons. There had long been bad blood between him and Catch-the-Bear, Sitting Bull's principal lieutenant. As Sitting Bull had publicly backed Catch-the-Bear, he too had been drawn into the feud. Bull Head rather looked forward to the day when he would receive orders from the agent to arrest Sitting Bull. It would help to quench his thirst for vengeance.
Meanwhile, he and his men kept vigilant watch on Sitting Bull's camp and reported every occurrence to John M. Carignan, whose school stood three miles down the river from Sitting Bull's settlement. Carignan in turn sent frequent reports to McLaughlin by police courier. As Sitting Bull well knew, few events happened on Grand River of which the agent for long remained uninformed.
The dances continued, Sitting Bull presiding over them from a handsome lodge erected several hundred feet in front of his cabin. When not dancing, he and his men held long councils in the cabin he shared with his two wives, his children, and a fluctuating number of relatives. The chief's son Crow Foot, a solemn youth of seventeen, joined all the talks and displayed a wisdom remarkable for one so young. He was preparing himself for the chieftainship and never played with the other boys. "He grew old too early," recalled one who knew him.
Aside from Carignan, the only white person in the vicinity was Mary Collins, the purposeful Congregational missionary. She tried hard to lead Sitting Bull to renounce the Ghost Dance and put a stop to it among his people. As she later remembered it, he admitted his lack of faith in the doctrine but declared that he had gone too far to turn back now. Gall, too, worked against the dance. Once a mighty chief, he had led the Hunkpapas in the shattering assault that overwhelmed Custer. Now, still a personification of dignity and strength, he helped the agent guide the Hunkpapas along the white man's road. At his camp on the Missouri near the mouth of Grand River, he held councils with all who would come, eloquently pleading for an end to the dance and a return to the white man's church and school. His efforts bore fruit when Running Horse and his whole band defected from the standard of Sitting Bull.
The weather at last turned cold, and on December 5 it began to snow. The next day was ration day, when most of the Grand River people would be at the agency. McLaughlin wired Washington: "Everything quiet at present; weather cold and snowing. Am I authorized to arrest Sitting Bull and other fomentors of mischief when I think best?" McLaughlin's request arrived in Washington at a bad time. As we have seen, the Cody affair at Standing Rock and Agent Dixon's wholesale arrests at Lower Brulé had led the President to review the question of arrests. Only the day before, he had passed his decision on to Secretary Noble. Although Acting Commissioner Belt favored giving McLaughlin free rein, Noble, probably with relief, could fall back on the policy set by the White House. McLaughlin had his answer the same day, December 5, and all the other Sioux agents received similar messages: "Secretary directs that you make no arrests whatever except under orders of the military or upon an order of the Secretary of the Interior."
General Miles now held the high cards. On December 10 he had a confidential telegram sent to General Ruger ordering him to "direct the Commanding Officer Fort Yates to secure the person of Sitting Bull, using any practical means. The agent at that post is under his direction and orders for any purpose of this kind or any purpose affecting the police, control and government of these Indians." For some reason, Ruger delayed passing the word to Colonel Drum until December 12, then wired him in cipher to "make it your especial duty to secure the person of Sitting Bull. Call on Indian agent to cooperate and render such assistance as will best promote the purpose in view."
Ruger and Drum were still inclined to follow McLaughlin's lead. Drum took the telegram to agency headquarters, and he and McLaughlin decided to carry out their original plan. The next ration day was December 20, and they set this as the date for the coup.
Events were already shaping that would upset the timetable. Sitting Bull had received an invitation from Short Bull and Kicking Bear to join them in the Stronghold. In council, the Grand River headmen agreed that their leader ought to go. On the 11th a courier brought Sitting Bull a message from the agent ordering the dancers to disperse to their homes. That night the headmen assembled at Sitting Bull's cabin and discussed both matters. Sitting Bull addressed a letter to McLaughlin, dictating it to his semiliterate son-in-law Andrew Fox. Fox had considerable trouble putting the Hunkpapa thoughts into English, but two salient points emerged from the nearly incoherent result. First, McLaughlin should quit meddling in the religious affairs of the Indians—in other words, the people had no intention of giving up the Ghost Dance and going home. And second, "I got to go to Agency & to know this Pray"—in other words, he had to go to Pine Ridge to learn more about the faith from those who best knew its tenets. A member of the chief's personal bodyguard, Bull Ghost, rode to Standing Rock with the letter and handed it to McLaughlin on the evening of the 12th, several hours after Drum had brought over the order for Sitting Bull's arrest.
The very thought of Sitting Bull's presence at Pine Ridge made McLaughlin shudder. Short Bull and Kicking Bear were smalltime medicine men who, as undoubted authorities on the Ghost Dance, had catapulted to fame. The people looked to them as apostles of the religion but accorded them decidedly less respect as temporal leaders. The defection of Two Strike and his people amply demonstrated this truth. A leader with the towering stature of Sitting Bull was another matter. If he succeeded in reaching the Stronghold, the Pine Ridge situation might well blow up in General Brooke's face.
But as Sitting Bull's letter to McLaughlin gave no indication of when he planned to depart for Pine Ridge, there appeared no reason to move the date of the arrest forward. Immediately after reading the letter, however, McLaughlin had his interpreter, Louis Primeau, dash off a quick note to Lieutenant Bull Head. A policeman, White Bird, carried it to Grand River. The message alerted Bull Head that Sitting Bull might try to leave the reservation and cautioned him to keep close watch on the dance camp for any such move. Under pretext of beginning construction of the halfway shelter on Oak Creek, the lieutenant was to gather in all the policemen strung along Grand River. If Sitting Bull tried to leave, "you must stop him and if he does not listen to you do as you see fit, use your own discretion in the matter and it will be all right."
McLaughlin also sent verbal instructions by Sergeant Shave Head, who happened to be at the agency. The sergeant was to inform Bull Head that orders had arrived for the seizure of Sitting Bull. When the time came, McLaughlin would give the word. If Sitting Bull tried to leave the reservation before that time, Bull Head was to act on his own initiative, for the chief's flight had to be blocked by any means. That same night, Shave Head and a handful of agency policemen started for Grand River. The next morning, December 13, another eight men under Sgt. John Eagle Man left the agency bound for Oak Creek, ostensibly to help build the shelter.
This same Saturday the 13th, Bull Head learned of another council at Sitting Bull's cabin in which the headmen had agreed that their chief should leave for Pine Ridge on Monday the 15th. They immediately began to corral their horses and make other preparations for the trip. On the night of the 13th Bull Head reported these developments to John Carignan, who shortly after midnight drafted a report to McLaughlin. It read in part:
Sitting Bull has received a letter from the Pine Ridge outfit, asking him to come over there as God was to appear to them. Sitting Bull's people want him to go, but he has sent a letter to you asking your permission, and if you do not give it, he is going to go anyway; he has been fitting up his horses to stand a long ride and will go horseback in case he is pursued.
Bull Head would like to arrest him at once before he has a chance of giving them the slip, as he thinks that if he gets the start, it will be impossible to catch him. He says to send word to him by courier immediately.
Carignan entrusted the letter to Hawk Man, one of twenty special policemen recently authorized as temporary additions to the force. He began the forty-mile ride immediately.
Late the following afternoon, December 14, Hawk Man dashed into the agency on a lathered pony. Colonel Drum saw him rein up at the agent's office and walked over to learn the news. He found McLaughlin reading the letter from Carignan. No longer could they hope to defer the arrest until the next ration day. Both agreed that it must be made the following morning, December 15. Together, they drafted instructions for Bull Head:
From report brought by Scout "Hawk Man," I believe that the time has arrived for the arrest of Sitting Bull and it can be made by the Indian police without much risk. I therefore desire you to make the arrest before daylight tomorrow morning, and try and get back to the Sitting Bull road crossing of Oak Creek by daylight to-morrow morning or as soon thereafter as possible. The Cavalry will leave tonight and reach the Sitting Bull crossing of Oak Creek before daylight to-morrow morning (Monday), where they will remain until they hear from you.
Louis Primeau will accompany the Cavalry command as guide, and I desire you to send a messenger to the Cavalry as soon as you can after making the arrest, so that the troops may know how to act in aiding you or preventing any attempt of his followers from rescuing him.
I have ordered all the police at Oak Creek to proceed to Carignan's school and await your orders. This gives you a force of 42 policemen for the arrest.
Very respectfully,
James McLaughlin,
U.S. Indian Agent.
P.S. You must not let him escape under any circumstances.
At 5:45 that evening Second Sergeant Red Tomahawk galloped out of Standing Rock with two copies of these orders—one in English, the other in Santee Sioux. Another courier left with a similar message for Carignan. At almost exactly the same hour, the officers at Fort Yates were gathering for after-dinner cigars when "officers' call" sent them scurrying to post headquarters. By 11 P.M. the wagons had been loaded, and as the cavalry troopers sat down to a hot dinner, Colonel Drum, Agent McLaughlin, and Captain Fechet assembled in Drum's office to go over the captain's orders. They agreed that, instead of halting at Oak Creek, the cavalry should move ten to twelve miles closer to Grand River, in order to be within more effective supporting distance of the police. At midnight, Troops F and G, Eighth Cavalry, moved out behind Captain Fechet. There were five officers and ninety-nine enlisted men, two wagons, a Hotchkiss gun, and a Gatling gun.
Red Tomahawk reached Bull Head's cabin at 10:15 that night, having ridden the forty miles from Standing Rock in only four and one-half hours. Unfamiliar with the roads, he had taken the wrong crossing of Oak Creek and thus had missed Sergeant Eagle Man. Bull Head selected Iron Thunder, who weighed only 135 pounds, to race back to Oak Creek, eighteen miles distant. He was to tell Eagle Man to join the rest of the police at Sitting Bull's house promptly at daybreak.
About 1:00 A.M. John Carignan and two more policemen from downriver came in. Following the road, they had passed directly through Sitting Bull's camp. The nightly orgy of dancing had ended, and the silent camp, dimly lit by the dying embers of the fires, resounded with the clatter of Carignan's buggy. Dogs began to bark, and an Indian came out of his lodge to investigate. In the darkness, he could not make out the identity of the intruders, but accepted their explanation that they were destined for the agency. Thirty policemen had now assembled at Bull Head's cabin.
It was a solemn gathering. Even before Bull Head asked Chaska, the local interpreter, to read the orders brought by Red Tomahawk, the men knew that the moment they had been dreading had come at last. Devoted as they were to Bull Head and McLaughlin, reprehensible as they considered Sitting Bull's recent activities, they could not shake a haunting uneasiness over the role in which they had been cast. They were Sioux, some of them Hunkpapa Sioux. They were about to set forth to challenge other Hunkpapas in the name of the white man and to perform a mission that few believed could be accomplished without shedding Hunkpapa blood. "We all felt sad," recalled John Lone Man.
After McLaughlin's instructions had been read, Bull Head outlined the plan for taking the chief. They would move first to Gray Eagle's house, a short distance east of Bull Head's. Then, just before dawn, they would ride quickly to a position south of the river across from Sitting Bull's camp. As the dancers would expect any threat to come from the direction of the agency, Bull Head hoped that his column, approaching from the opposite direction, would be less readily discovered. Promptly at dawn, the police would cross the river and quietly surround Sitting Bull's cabin. The officers would enter and make the arrest.
Carignan knew the route proposed by Bull Head. Recalling that McLaughlin had stressed the necessity of taking a light spring wagon in which to spirit Sitting Bull away before his people could rally, the teacher spoke up. "How about the spring buggy you are going to use to take Sitting Bull to the agency? You can't take it over that rough trail on the south side of the river." Bull Head had decided, however, not to use a wagon. Instead, while the officers were inside the cabin, Red Bear and White Bird were to saddle Sitting Bull's favorite horse, an old gray circus animal presented to him by Buffalo Bill, and have it ready for the chief to mount as soon as the arrest had been made.
The police rode over to Gray Eagle's house and waited, passing the time by telling war stories of old. At 4:30 A.M. Eagle Man rode in with nine men. Rather than go directly from Oak Creek to Sitting Bull's, as directed by the lieutenant, he had ridden to Bull Head's, then followed to Gray Eagle's. He had no wish, he explained, to risk another Little Bighorn affair. There, Custer had charged in two parties, and bad timing had led to disaster. This time Sitting Bull must confront his aggressors all at once.
Back at Bull Head's, Carignan brewed a pot of coffee and lingered over a cup before climbing into his buggy for the long, cold ride to the agency. At Gray Eagle's the police, now numbering thirty-nine plus four volunteers, knelt in the predawn blackness and prayed to the white man's God, then went outside and mounted. "Hopo," commanded Bull Head, and the column trotted toward the river.
A freezing drizzle made the ride miserable, and the mantle of depression that settled on the horsemen grew heavier as they wound through the icy thickets of the river bottom. Owls hooted and coyotes howled. Even they gave warning, remarked one of the men, "so beware." At 5:30 A.M., in the gray half-light of dawn, the police forded the river behind Sitting Bull's house, then fanned out and rushed into the village at a gallop. Instantly the packs of dogs set up a noisy barking.
At Sitting Bull's the police dismounted and swiftly surrounded the cabin. Red Bear and White Bird ran back to the corral to saddle the gray circus horse. Bull Head, flanked by Shave Head and Red Tomahawk, sprang to the door and pounded on it; Lone Man took station to one side. The knock woke Sitting Bull and he called out, "How, all right, come in." The officers entered. One struck a match, sought out a kerosene lamp, and lit it. Sitting Bull crawled out from under the blankets of his pallet. In the nude, he looked wholly insignificant and breathed none of the defiance that might have been expected under the circumstances.
"I come after you to take you to the agency," said Bull Head. "You are under arrest." The old chief submitted meekly. "How," he replied, "let me put on my clothes and go with you." One of his wives brought his clothing, and he slowly dressed himself. By now Crow Foot was up, too. Sitting Bull told him to go saddle a horse, but Bull Head interrupted to say that this had already been taken care of. As the officers and their prisoner started through the door, the wife began to howl—an Indian custom, said Lone Man, of saying goodbye.
Outside the police were already in trouble. Barking dogs and, finally, the cry of Sitting Bull's wife had roused the whole camp. It bustled with excited Indians, all converging on the cabin of their chief. They pressed tightly on the cordon of police, many of whom, recently recruited, grew frightened and unsure of themselves. From the doorway the officers emerged with Sitting Bull, Shave Head on the left, Bull Head on the right, and Red Tomahawk behind. The prisoner's horse was not ready yet, and the four men stood, waiting, in front of the door. The crowd, bristling with anger, now included most of the camp.
Catch-the-Bear shouldered his way through the mob. Beside himself with hate, he surveyed the scene in front of the cabin. Here was his chief, whom he had sworn to defend and to whom he was personally devoted, being abducted by his mortal enemy, Bull Head. The day of reckoning had come. "Now, here are the ceska maza [metal breasts]," he said scornfully, so all could hear, "just as we had expected all the time. You think you are going to take him. You shall not do it." Turning to the people behind him, he commanded, "Come on now, let us protect our chief!"
Some of the men began to work through the police line and press closer to Sitting Bull. Crow Foot, the youth who had grown up too fast, came out of the cabin and chided his father. "Well, you always called yourself a brave chief. Now you are allowing yourself to be taken by the ceska maza." This was too much for the old man. His people expected more of him; they only awaited his command to fall upon the metal breasts. "Then I shall not go," he declared.
The horse had finally been readied and brought around. Bull Head implored Sitting Bull to go peaceably. "Come now," he begged, "do not listen to anyone." "Uncle," Lone Man added, "nobody is going to hurt you. The agent wants to see you and then you are to come back—so please do not let others lead you into any trouble." But the chief hung back. Bull Head and Shave Head grasped his arms and pulled. Red Tomahawk pushed from behind. The people went wild, shook their fists, cursed the policemen, and shouted, "You shall not take our chief." "The police tried to keep order," recalled Lone Man, but "it was like trying to extinguish a treacherous prairie fire."
At this moment Catch-the-Bear threw off his blanket and shouldered his Winchester. Bringing Bull Head into the sights, he pulled the trigger. The bullet tore into the officer's right side and sent him sprawling. As he fell, he turned his revolver on Sitting Bull and shot him full in the chest. At the same instant, Red Tomahawk fired another bullet into the back of his head. The mighty chief of the Hunkpapas dropped to the ground, dead. Lone Man sprang at the smoking muzzle of the Winchester that had gunned his beloved relative and superior, Bull Head. Again Catch-the-Bear pulled the trigger, but the hammer snapped. Lone Man tore the rifle from Catch-the-Bear's grasp, clubbed him with the butt, and shot him dead.
Infuriated, Sitting Bull's followers swarmed over the metal breasts with knives, clubs, and guns. It was a terrible fight at close quarters. The wounded Bull Head caught three more bullets. Sergeant Shave Head fell before the rifle of Strikes-the-Kettle, another of Sitting Bull's top subordinates. Of the assailants, Chiefs Spotted-Horn-Bull and Brave Thunder, together with three other men, went down with mortal wounds. Four more policemen dropped. In the midst of the melee, with bullets lacing the air, Sitting Bull's old horse sat down and began to perform tricks learned during its days with the Wild West show. The police were scared. Had the spirit of the dead chief entered the sitting horse?
In a matter of minutes, the bloody fight ended as abruptly as it began. The dancers broke away and raced to a grove of trees lining the river behind Sitting Bull's cabin. One fired a parting shot that knocked over another policeman. Red Tomahawk now took command and ordered some of the police to drag Bull Head, still alive, into the cabin and make him as comfortable as possible on a pallet.
Inside, one of the men spied a slight movement in a pile of blankets. Lone Man pulled them aside and revealed Crow Foot. The boy cried out, "My uncles, do not kill me. I do not wish to die." The police asked Bull Head what to do. The lieutenant, four bullets in him, looked up from his pallet. "Do what you like with him," he answered bitterly. "He is one of them that has caused this trouble." One of the men struck the boy a staggering blow that sent him reeling across the room and out the door. There, as he lay dazed on the ground, two more policemen pumped bullets into him. Tears streaming down their cheeks, they killed him.
Red Tomahawk summoned Hawk Man No. 1 (the other Hawk Man lay dead outside the cabin) and instructed him to ride fast and bring the soldiers. Hawk Man mounted the gray circus horse and galloped off on the road toward Oak Creek. As he left the battleground, the Sitting Bull people, having rallied, opened fire from the timber. The police took cover in the sheds and corrals behind the cabin, and the two sides exchanged long-range fire.
About three miles north of Grand River, Hawk Man met Captain Fechet and the cavalry squadron. He told the captain that all the police had been killed, he alone escaping. As the troopers prepared for action, stripping off their overcoats and gloves, Fechet scrawled a message to Colonel Drum, informing him of Hawk Man's report and stating that the squadron would rush to the relief of any police who might still be alive. With this letter, Hawk Man rode up the trail toward Standing Rock.
The cavalry formed in two parallel columns of fours, with the artillery between. Fechet had just ordered the advance when another policeman rode up. He reported, more accurately than Hawk Man, that the police were penned up in Sitting Bull's house by the dancers, were almost out of ammunition, and could not hold out much longer. With mounting excitement, the two columns broke into a gallop.
Climbing the last ridge before reaching Grand River Valley, the Hotchkiss gun lurched in a rut and turned over. The harness broke and the mule pulled free. The ambulance, bringing up the rear, halted at the scene of the accident, and Hospital Steward August Nickel jumped out. A giant of a man, he crawled in the back of the ambulance, braced his feet against the tailgate, and took a firm grip on the shafts of the gun carriage. The driver cracked his whip, and the ambulance moved up the slope, pulling the cannon.
From the crest of the ridge, Fechet surveyed the valley. Some 1,500 yards to his front was the Sitting Bull settlement. To his right front, about 900 yards distant, Indians were firing from the top of a knoll at Sitting Bull's cabin. From the timber beyond the cabin came the sound of more firing. And finally, shots were being directed at both places from the cabin. Fechet could not tell friend from foe. He raised a white flag, the signal that had been arranged with the police. None of the parties responded. At Fechet's command, Lt. E. C. Brooks ran the Hotchkiss gun into battery and dropped a shell into the open space between the cabin and the timber. Shortly afterward, a white flag fluttered in front of the cabin. (The shell exploded uncomfortably close to the police. Lone Man tore the white curtain from a window, tied it to a stick, and rushed out waving it at the soldiers.)
Brooks now opened fire on the timber. A few rounds exploded, and the Indians scattered into the hills south of the river. Next he turned the cannon on the knoll to the right front. With shells bursting nearby, these Indians broke for the valley, then veered west and fled up the river to the northwest. Lt. S. L. Slocum dismounted G Troop and pushed a skirmish line into the valley. Lt. E. H. Crowder led F Troop along the top of the ridge to the right to cover Slocum's flank. G Troop moved at double time to the cabin and united with the police, then continued to the river and cleaned out the few remaining Indians, who ran across the river to join their comrades. Upstream, Crowder gave chase to the Hunkpapas fleeing in that direction, but could not catch them. After searching every cabin for a distance of two miles above Sitting Bull's, he led his men back. Slocum and the police had also returned from sweeping out the timber.
The scene around Sitting Bull's house stamped itself on Captain Fechet's memory. "I saw evidence of a most desperate encounter," he later wrote. "In front of the house, and within a radius of 50 yards, were the bodies of 8 dead Indians, including that of Sitting Bull, and 2 dead horses. In the house were 4 dead policemen and 3 wounded, 2 mortally [Bull Head and Shave Head]. To add to the horror of the scene the squaws of Sitting Bull, who were in a small house nearby, kept up a great wailing."
Some of Policeman John Strong Arm's relatives, who lived in the Grand River settlement, came to where the troops had gathered. In the stable they saw the body of Strong Arm, and they added their fearful wails to those of Sitting Bull's widows. One of the relatives, Holy Medicine, picked up a neckyoke, walked over to the body of Sitting Bull, and with a savage blow smashed in the face. Pvt. Jerry Hart, one of the soldiers, asked, "What the hell did you do that for? The man is dead. Leave him alone." Sgt. James Hanaghan, fearing that the body, lying in a pool of blood, would freeze to the ground, detailed Pvt. A. L. Bloomer to move it and to stand guard in order to prevent further mutilation.
Fires had been kindled, and the soldiers were variously occupied feeding their horses and preparing breakfast. Just as Captain Fechet raised a cup of coffee to his lips, the police shouted an alarm. From the timber only eighty yards distant burst a single Indian. Mounted on a black horse, brandishing a long staff, and singing a ghost song, he raced at full speed toward the soldiers. (This was Crow Woman, one of the most zealous believers in the new faith. He had donned a Ghost Shirt and was demonstrating to his people, who watched from the hills across the river, that it did in fact turn the bullets of the white man.) The police loosed a volley, and the horseman wheeled abruptly back to the shelter of the timber. He emerged some four hundred yards up the valley, and again the fire of the police drove him back to the trees. A third time he galloped into the open, this time passing between two cavalrymen Fechet had sent out as pickets. They opened fire, but the warrior escaped up the valley unscathed. For many Hunkpapas, here indeed was proof of the magical qualities of the Ghost Shirt.
Fechet's orders contemplated the arrest of Sitting Bull but were silent about his followers. Fearing that any pursuit would stir up the friendly Indians and perhaps drive them into the ranks of the dancers, the captain decided to return to Fort Yates. The guards released Sitting Bull's widows, and Fechet told them to get word to the people who had run away that the troops were leaving, and any who cared to return home could do so in safety. He also sent runners up and down the valley to notify all Indians who wished to come into the agency that they could accompany the cavalry. A large number, anxious to get out of the battle area, accepted the offer and fell in with the column.
The three wounded policemen, Bull Head, Shave Head, and Middle, were laid in the ambulance for the journey back to Standing Rock. The dead policemen had to share the single wagon with the corpse of Sitting Bull, an arrangement in which their surviving comrades acquiesced only after the most peremptory order from Sergeant Red Tomahawk. The bodies of the men who fell in defense of Sitting Bull were dragged into the stable, to be buried later by Congregational missionary T. L. Riggs. At 1:00 P.M. the cavalcade pointed north and at 6:00 bivouacked at Oak Creek crossing. Near midnight, Colonel Drum marched in with the two companies of infantry from Fort Yates.
Late on the morning of December 16 a messenger from Colonel Drum rode into Standing Rock with news of the tragic events on Grand River. He dispelled the apprehension that had gripped the agency and military post since noon the day before, when Hawk Man had dashed in on Sitting Bull's horse to report that all the police had been killed. Colonel Drum had moved out two hours later with the infantry, and ever since the people left behind had waited anxiously for more news. Now, Drum sent word that he and Fechet had decided that the troops might do much harm by returning to Grand River. Accordingly, they were on their way back to Standing Rock.
At noon, the soldier-teacher at the little school at Fort Yates gave his pupils the rest of the day off. "No school for us this afternoon! No school, and we can see them bring in Sitting Bull!" Seven-year-old Frank Fiske later remembered the scene vividly. First came the dead-wagon, with the bodies of the policemen piled in on top of Sitting Bull. Next came the ambulance with the wounded policemen. Mounted police rode escort, together with the Indians who had accompanied the troops back from Grand River. As the procession passed the trader's store, where young Fiske stood watching, the women were moaning death songs. About a mile behind rode the cavalry; still farther in the rear marched the infantry. The wagons proceeded through the post and into the agency, while the cavalry turned off and halted at the stables.
The dead policemen were laid out in the agency meeting hall and the body of Sitting Bull deposited in the deadhouse behind the Fort Yates hospital. At the small hospital maintained by Catholic Sisters in the agency boarding school, the agency and Army doctors worked hard to save the wounded policemen. Bull Head and Shave Head were beyond help. The latter's stomach had been torn open, and he knew he would die. "Did I do well, father?" he asked McLaughlin. The agent could only nod. "Then I will die in the faith of the white man and to which my five children already belong, and be with them. Send for my wife, that we may be married by the Black Gown before I die." A messenger rode out to bring Shave Head's wife from her home eighteen miles distant. During the night, Shave Head died in the arms of Father Bernard Strassmaier. Fifteen minutes later, the dead man's wife arrived, and sang the death song at his door. Bull Head lingered into the next day. He struggled, reopened his wounds, then died quietly. Middle, the third policeman, recovered.
On the afternoon of December 17, the Standing Rock Indians crowded into the little frame church of Congregational missionary George W. Reed, south of the agency. They filled the pews and lined the walls. Reverend Reed and Father Strassmaier conducted joint services for the six slain policemen. Then the people walked to the cemetery adjacent to the Catholic mission church at the agency. Five graves had been prepared. (Little Eagle, the sixth casualty, was taken back to Grand River for burial.) A company of infantry snapped to attention and fired three volleys over the graves. As the coffins sank into the ground, the notes of "taps" mingled with the mourning wails of the Sioux.
McLaughlin opened the cemetery gate and walked slowly toward Fort Yates. At the post cemetery he joined three officers who stood beside another open grave. On the bottom rested a rough wooden box that contained the canvas-wrapped remains of Sitting Bull. A detail of four soldiers—military prisoners— shoveled dirt into the hole.
It was near the end of an era, not only for Standing Rock Agency but for the whole American West. In the popular mind, no chief so fully personified the spirit of Indian resistance as the old man whose body lay in the coffin. Although the Battle of Wounded Knee Creek two weeks later was still to come, it was the end of Sitting Bull that symbolized the end of the Indian wars.
1. Pine Ridge Agency about 1885: (1) boarding school, (2) council room and physician's office, (3) offices, (4) supply storehouse, (5) commissary, (6) police quarters, (7) employees' quarters, (8) agent's quarters, (9) interpreter's quarters, (10) stable and annuity issue center, (11) ice and meat house, (12) water works, (13) oil house, (14) Red Cloud's house.
2. The Crook Commission at Crow Creek Agency in July 1889. Seated left to right: Gov. Charles Foster, William Warner, Maj. Gen. George Crook, Maj. Cyrus S. Roberts, aide to Crook. Standing left to right: John A. Lott, stenographer; Wilson, messenger; John Warner, clerk; Jerome Miller, secretary.
3. Photographs of the Ghost Dance actually in progress are extremely rare. This one was taken on the Pine Ridge Reservation in December 1890 by A. G. Johnson of York, Neb.
4. American Horse (left) and Red Cloud at Pine Ridge Agency in January 1891.
5. Sitting Bull, as photographed by D. F. Barry shortly after his surrender in 1881.
6. Sgt. Red Tomahawk, Yanktonai Sioux policeman who shot Sitting Bull at Grand River on December 15, 1890. This photograph shows him as captain of Indian police about 1892.
7. Short Bull (left) and Kicking Bear, apostles of the Ghost Dance religion among the Sioux.
8. Troops from the "camp of observation" near the forks of Cheyenne River mingle with Miniconjou Ghost Dancers of Big Foot's band in the autumn of 1890.
9. Maj. Gen. Nelson A. Miles, as commander of the Division of the Missouri, directed the campaign against the Sioux Ghost Dancers in 1890–91. A distinguished Civil War general and Indian fighter, he later commanded the United States Army during the Spanish American War. This portrait was made about 1895.
10. Big Foot, Miniconjou Sioux chief killed at Wounded Knee. Although at first a strong proponent of the Ghost Dance, his enthusiasm waned. Renowned as a peacemaker, he was headed for Pine Ridge Agency to make peace when apprehended by the military and ordered to camp on Wounded Knee Creek. This picture was probably made ten years earlier.
11. Little Wound, Oglala chief, was at first a powerful advocate of the Ghost Dance, but shortly after the appearance of troops at Pine Ridge he shifted his influence to the cause of peace. William Dinwiddie made this portrait in 1896.
12. Brig. Gen. John R. Brooke, commanding the Department of the Platte, exercised field command of the troops at Pine Ridge in 1890–91.
13. The officer corps of the Seventh U.S. Cavalry still contained veterans of the Little Bighorn when this picture was taken at Pine Ridge in January 1891, shortly after the Battle of Wounded Knee. Seated left to right: Capt. W.S. Edgerly, Capt. Henry J. Nowlan, unidentified, Capt. Charles A. Varnum, Col. James W. Forsyth, Maj. Samuel M. Whitside, Capt. Myles Moylan, Capt. Edward S. Godfrey, unidentified.
14. Troop of the Seventh Cavalry at Pine Ridge Agency in January 1891.
15. Part of Battery E, First U.S. Artillery, at Pine Ridge Agency in January 1891. Cpl. Paul H. Weinert is seated behind the Hotchkiss gun with which he drove the Sioux from the ravine "pocket" at Wounded Knee and thus won a Medal of Honor.
16. The field of Wounded Knee as it appeared during the burial of the dead. The body in the foreground is that of Yellow Bird, the medicine man who incited the young men of Big Foot's band to fight. This is a drawing executed by Mary Irvin Wright from an imperfect photograph for James Mooney's _Ghost-Dance_.
17. The dead of Big Foot's band were buried in a mass grave on top of the hill from which the artillery had fired during the battle. A civilian group did the work under contract. Infantrymen stood by to guard against attack by angry Sioux.
18. Two Strike, Crow Dog, and High Hawk, prominent leaders of the Brulé Sioux, at Pine Ridge Agency after the surrender in January 1891.
19. General Miles and staff viewing the Indian camp at Pine Ridge Agency on January 16, 1891, the day after the surrender.
20. Sioux camp on White Clay Creek at Pine Ridge Agency in January 1891, at the time of the final surrender. After the Indians returned to their dank cabins, never again did a single village contain so many tepees.
21. Buffalo Bill and Sioux leaders at Pine Ridge Agency in January 1891. Seated left to right: Thunder Hawk, American Horse, John A. McDonough (correspondent of the _New York World)_ , Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, Kicking Bear, Maj. John Burke (manager of Cody's Wild West show); standing left to right: Rocky Bear, Good Voice, Two Lance, J. C. Craiger, Two Strike, Buffalo Bill Cody, Crow Dog, High Hawk, Short Bull.
22. Plenty Horses murdered Lt. E. W. Casey to wipe out the stain of Carlisle Indian School and win the favor of his people. A court judged the crime an act of war and set him free. He is shown here at Fort Meade while awaiting trial in the spring of 1891.
23. Ghost Dancers imprisoned at Fort Sheridan, Ill., following the surrender, January 1891. Nos. 4 and 5 are Kicking Bear and Short Bull.
24. The Wounded Knee battlefield today, looking north. In the foreground is the ravine "pocket" from which the Sioux inflicted heavy casualties on the troops before artillery drove them out. The church stands on Cemetery Hill, from which the Hotchkiss guns raked the Indian village below (right, near windmill). The dead of Big Foot's band are buried in a common grave behind the church.
## _10. BIG FOOT_
NEWS OF Sitting Bull's death swept the nation, for few Indian celebrities had enjoyed greater prominence. Westerners applauded his passing, and many of the eastern reform group, regretting the violence of his end, could not suppress a sigh of relief that circumstances had at last rolled this rock of reaction from the path of progress. Yet opinion was hardly unanimous. T. A. Bland, whose National Indian Defense Association waged constant war on the conventional reform theories of the day, led a swelling chorus of denunciation.
"The land grabbers wanted the Indian land," shouted a New York minister, follower of Bland. "The lying, thieving Indian agents wanted silence touching past thefts and immunity to continue their thieving. The renegades... among the Indian police wanted an opportunity to show their power.... And so he was murdered."
Sensationalist newspapers took up the cry and spread across the land the charge that McLaughlin and Drum had conspired to murder Sitting Bull, that they had quietly instructed the Indian police to bring in a corpse, and that the soldiers had stood by to make certain the police did not fail in their duty. Eager to believe any rumor, Bland wrote the Indian Office that certain "parties" planned to "make [Sitting Bull's] bones a subject of speculation and perhaps his skin also," and demanded punishment of "any parties" found guilty. McLaughlin patiently collected sufficient evidence to refute this accusation but could not stay the larger criticism sweeping the press.
The storm shook the office of the Secretary of the Interior and justified his worst fears. For a month, ever since arrests began to be talked about, Noble had maneuvered to insulate his department from any possible criticism by shifting all responsibility for arrests to the War Department. Now, Indian police, acting under an agent's orders, had thrust the department into the burning glare of public condemnation.
For a month Noble exerted himself to throw the responsibility back to the Army. Three times he made the agent report at length the authority under which he had sent his police to Grand River. "McLaughlin is so proud of his exploit," the Secretary wrote Commissioner Morgan, "that he rather suppresses the source of his action. But it is necessary that it be shown and understood that this was the act of the _Military, without qualification._ " McLaughlin might write page after page explaining how he had merely obeyed the orders of Colonel Drum, who had obeyed the orders of General Ruger, who had obeyed the orders of General Miles, but the press saw only that the central actors in the tragedy were the agent and his policemen. Although the Secretary surely understood that Colonel Drum had acquiesced in a plan conceived and long championed by McLaughlin, he could hardly deny the validity of the explanation. He could only fume at the agent for embarrassing the department and look forward to the day when he might be quietly replaced. (Enjoying widespread and influential support, McLaughlin was a highly regarded Indian Inspector long after Noble stepped down from the Cabinet.)
McLaughlin could not have been more astonished at the furor that burst over his head, nor more angry at the wild stories hurled back and forth by the press. If he was not in fact so proud of his exploit as the Secretary assumed, he was very proud indeed of the valor and devotion to duty displayed by his policemen. Instead of protesting the outcome, he felt, the public ought to be pouring out its gratitude to the men who had offered their lives in the cause of progress. He began at once a crusade to win pensions for the survivors and the widows of the slain, a crusade in which Colonel Drum, General Ruger, and Commissioner Morgan joined. (The effort, which was to see many years of agitation, was destined to fail.)
Other matters occupied McLaughlin in the days immediately following the Grand River affair. Infuriated at the death of their chief, or simply frightened, or both, nearly 400 of Sitting Bull's followers had stampeded when the troops appeared on Grand River. Aware that these people possessed considerable potential for harm if they succeeded in uniting with Kicking Bear and Short Bull in the Stronghold, or even with the Miniconjous along Cheyenne River, McLaughlin promptly sent out emissaries to coax the fugitives back to the agency.
Fechet's artillery had sent them flying southward toward the reservation line. Destitute, a few wounded, they had not paused until reaching the Miniconjou settlements on the Moreau River, within the Cheyenne River Reservation. Here, McLaughlin's couriers overtook them. In hurried councils, the Hunkpapas heard the agent's promises of kind treatment, and 160 people promptly turned back toward Standing Rock. Another eighty-eight remained indecisively on the Moreau, ultimately to return home, too. The rest faced south, hoping to find asylum with Big Foot on Cheyenne River.
News of Sitting Bull's death had no discernible effect either upon the friendlies at Pine Ridge or upon the dancers in the Stronghold. Small parties of warriors from the Stronghold continued to range through the ranching country along the Cheyenne and to meet in harmless brushes with Colonel Day's cowboy militia. While still trying to persuade a reluctant Miles to authorize a simultaneous offensive on the Stronghold from the north and south, Brooke prepared to mount another peace offensive. Fearing that Day's men might complicate the effort, Miles ordered the colonel to keep his troops north of the Cheyenne. The plan was to send a force of 500 friendlies from Pine Ridge into the Stronghold to negotiate once more with the dancers. Preparations consumed most of the week following Sitting Bull's death.
On December 22 a touch of humor relieved the tension at Pine Ridge. The Indian policemen hauled before Agent Royer a white man they had picked up wandering through the camps, a white blanket draped over his shoulders, preaching to all who would listen. He gave his name as A. C. Hopkins of Nashua, Iowa. The name was not unfamiliar, for he had recently acquired some notoriety by noisily advocating the pansy as the national flower. Now he quietly informed Royer, "I claim to be Christ, the Messiah, in a poetic sense, the same poetic sense in which Hiawatha, Socrates and General Grant are considered and esteemed the world over." In fact, he had been trying for several days to convince the Oglalas that he was the Messiah prophesied by Wovoka. Since he could not speak their language, the Indians were not deceived, but they treated him with the respect and kindness customarily accorded the insane. Royer was less respectful. "Prove that you are Christ," he demanded. "Give me more time among these Indians and I will," was the answer. Said Royer, "I'll give you just one hour to get out of town." Within an hour, Hopkins was seated in a wagon bound for Rushville under police escort.
Hopkins repaired to Sioux City, where he called at the office of the _Sioux City Journal_ on December 24. After a long interview with a reporter who had nothing better to do on Christmas Eve, Hopkins left a note and departed. "To America and the world," it read, "greeting: God's peace be with you. The Messiah. Christmas Eve, 1890."
The Miniconjous revered Big Foot (also known as Spotted Elk) as one of the outstanding chiefs in their tribe's history. His distinction rested less upon exploits of war than upon political and diplomatic triumphs. Success at negotiating peace between quarreling factions had earned him a reputation as the great compromiser of the Sioux, and other Teton tribes often sought his aid in patching up internal conflicts. Yet Big Foot was also uncompromisingly wedded to the old life, and this love of traditional ways had led him, in October and November 1890, to embrace the Ghost Dance in hope of restoring the old life. His people pitched camp with Hump on Cherry Creek and threw themselves wholeheartedly into the dance. Hump's defection early in December disillusioned Big Foot, and he took his band home to the cluster of cabins below the forks of Cheyenne River. Thereafter, he shunned the dance, although some of his people proved less willing to surrender a faith that offered so much. The fanatical medicine man, Yellow Bird, kept the Ghost Dance very much alive in Big Foot's band.
Despite the change of heart, Big Foot had already made his reputation. Generals Miles and Ruger duly noted the reports of his defiant behavior on Cherry Creek. On their list of troublemakers, he ranked with Sitting Bull himself, and Miles intended to have him arrested at the first favorable opportunity.
Lt. Col. Edwin V. Sumner had no intimation of the attitude of the generals, even though he was charged with the duty of watching Big Foot. Sumner had assumed command of the "camp of observation," now christened Camp Cheyenne, on December 3, shortly after Big Foot's return from Cherry Creek. In addition to keeping Big Foot under observation, Sumner's orders required him to protect the tiny settlements and isolated ranches on the Belle Fourche and Cheyenne Rivers. For this purpose he had about 200 men, both infantry and cavalry.
Sumner bore a name illustrious in the annals of the Indian-fighting cavalry for half a century, but he also had genuine respect and sympathy for the Indian. Big Foot discovered in the new soldier chief a warm and genial man. Shortly after the colonel's arrival, Big Foot and his headmen spent two days at Camp Cheyenne getting acquainted. "Without exception," testified Sumner, they "seemed not only willing but anxious to obey my order to remain quietly at home, and particularly wished me to inform my superiors that they were all on the side of the Government in the trouble then going on." In the next two weeks, Sumner and Big Foot exchanged frequent visits, and on each occasion the colonel emerged with strengthened conviction that Big Foot was sincere in his profession of friendship. He saw, too, that many of the villagers did not share their leader's pacifism, but he was "impressed with the idea that Big Foot was making an extraordinary effort to keep his followers quiet." The commander foresaw no trouble with Big Foot.
Sometime in the second week of December, runners brought Big Foot a message from the Oglala chiefs offering "the great compromiser" 100 ponies to come to Pine Ridge and restore tranquillity. After a long discussion with his headmen, who urged him to accept the invitation, Big Foot announced that he would first lead his people to Cheyenne River Agency to draw rations and annuity goods (December _22_ was issue day), and after the return he would decide whether or not to go to Pine Ridge. On December 15 (the day Sitting Bull was killed and the day the first of Two Strike's people reached Pine Ridge), the band moved off down the river. Sumner was much relieved, for at the agency the influence of Hump, combined with the warning implicit in the daily activity at Fort Bennett, might have a calming effect on the wilder of Big Foot's people.
Two days later, December 17, Sumner received the first hint that his superiors had designs on Big Foot. A courier from Fort Meade brought a telegram dispatched the day before from department headquarters in St. Paul: "It is desirable that Big Foot be arrested, and had it been practicable to send you [Capt. A. B.] Wells with his two troops [from Oelrichs], orders would have been given that you try to get him. In case of arrest, he will be sent to Fort Meade to be securely kept prisoner."
This was of course not a direct order, but it did indicate that General Ruger expected Sumner, now or later, to arrest Big Foot. It intimated, also, that Ruger would be very displeased if he knew that Sumner no longer had Big Foot under observation. Later in the day, scouts from downriver brought in another bit of disquieting news. The Hunkpapa refugees from the battle over Sitting Bull were descending Cherry Creek toward Cheyenne River, reportedly with the intention of talking the Miniconjous into joining them in a dash to Pine Ridge. Big Foot, en route to the agency, was now camped in this very area. At the same time, other reports suggested that some of the Hunkpapa fugitives might head for Pine Ridge on trails that ran west of Camp Cheyenne through the settlements fringing the Black Hills on the east.
Sumner faced an uncomfortable dilemma. If he marched for Cherry Creek, he might end up the scapegoat for depredations on the settlements; if he ignored Cherry Creek, he might end up the scapegoat for any explosion ignited by the combination of Sitting Bull Hunkpapas with Big Foot Miniconjous. The colonel vacillated for a day, then, on the morning of the 19th, he sent a platoon of twenty-two cavalrymen, under Lt. R. J. Duff, toward Cherry Creek to find out what he could about the Standing Rock Indians.
Word of the death of Sitting Bull and the flight of his people toward Cheyenne River had also reached Cheyenne River Agency and Fort Bennett. Col. H. C. Merriam, whose Seventh Infantry had been trying to get across the ice-choked Missouri River since December 7, now commanded all the troops in the vicinity. Merriam's mission was to march up Cheyenne River and join Sumner. As the movement might upset the handful of Miniconjous who still danced on Cherry Creek, he instructed Capt. J. H. Hurst, commanding Fort Bennett, to send an officer to reassure them. Hurst selected Lt. Harry E. Hale, and accompanied by Hump, a policeman named White Thunder, and the post guide, Nolland, the lieutenant set forth on the morning of December 18, Reaching Cheyenne City that evening, they found the settlement all but deserted. The one remaining citizen, crusty old Henry Angell, explained that at noon the day before reports of hostile Hunkpapas sweeping down from the north had stampeded everyone else. He alone refused to abandon his home. The lieutenant promptly sent White Thunder to inform Sumner of the situation, then set about trying to get news of the Hunkpapas from the Cherry Creek Miniconjous at Hump's old camp across the river.
By noon of the 20th he had made little progress and had resolved to cross the river himself when Hump reported the approach of a group of horsemen from the west. A short gallop confronted Hale and Hump with a party of forty-six Hunkpapa warriors. They appeared friendly, and Hale believed that he could persuade them to go to the agency if only he could communicate with them. At this critical juncture Henry Angell joined the council. He understood the rudiments of the sign language, and through him Hale managed to assure the Hunkpapas that if they would camp for twenty-four hours he would ride to the agency and return with Captain Hurst and an interpreter—and no other soldiers. They agreed, and Hale had Angell kill a beef so they could have a feast. Leaving Hump in charge, the lieutenant mounted his horse and raced for the agency. Fearing that in his absence some of Big Foot's people would tamper with the Hunkpapas, he completed the fifty-two-mile ride in six and one-half hours.
The fear was not unfounded. Big Foot had gone into camp on the evening of December 17 across Cheyenne River from Cavanaugh's store, twenty miles above the mouth of Cherry Creek. During the night an old Indian brought word to him that soldiers were coming up the river (two companies of Merriam's regiment had finally succeeded in crossing the Missouri). The next day two Hunkpapas, one with a bullet in his leg, arrived in the camp with the news of Sitting Bull's death and the flight of his people southward. The Miniconjous were frightened. Big Foot himself could not decide whether to continue the journey to the agency.
The next day, the 19th, the band moved across the river and made a new camp next to Cavanaugh's store, where the grass was better. Many were armed and painted, and they were holding Ghost Dances—at least so the Cavanaughs claimed. These men, James Cavanaugh and his two grown sons, were understandably frightened by the activity in their front yard. When some of Big Foot's men entered the store and said they were hungry, Cavanaugh lost no time loading them down with provisions. The Indians said they had no beef, and Cavanaugh told them to kill a calf. After they had departed on this mission, he bolted the door and rode swiftly up the river. The two boys watched from the hills for a time, then followed their father. James Cavanaugh ran into Lieutenant Duff's patrol of the Eighth Cavalry about ten miles east of Camp Cheyenne. He reported that he had been robbed by Big Foot's men and that a few Standing Rock people had joined Big Foot. Duff sent Cavanaugh's report to Colonel Sumner, who promptly started his whole command for Cherry Creek.
This same afternoon of the 19th Big Foot selected ten young men to seek out the Standing Rock refugees and offer them his hospitality. Arriving at the mouth of Cherry Creek next day, they found the Hunkpapa women huddled around fires on the north bank of the river. They wore only the clothing in which they had been turned out of bed on the morning of Sitting Bull's death. Some sang death songs; others mourned for those slain in the battle with Bull Head's police. All the men, including the Cherry Creek Miniconjous, were across the river near deserted Cheyenne City, awaiting Lieutenant Hale's return.
The emissaries from Big Foot crossed the river and found the men in council. Hump was urging surrender, and he immediately demanded to know what the newcomers wanted. They explained their mission. Belligerently, he shouted: "You don't have to take them to Big Foot's camp. I will take all these people to the agency. You people want to fight, and I will bring some infantry to help you." Then he formed his warriors, weapons cocked, in a menancing circle around Big Foot's men. But the Hunkpapas intervened, giving Hump to understand that if he meant to fight they would aid Big Foot's messengers. Hump backed down. The upshot of the argument was that 38 Standing Rock Indians and 30 young Miniconjou warriors, former followers of Hump, decided to take refuge with Big Foot, while 166 Hunkpapas and 55 Cherry Creek Miniconjous remained to hear what Captain Hurst had to offer.
Hurst and Hale, accompanied by a sergeant and two interpreters, reached Cheyenne City on the afternoon of the 21st. The captain had two beeves slaughtered, and that night, after a grand feast, he sat down to a council with the Indians. He spoke kindly but firmly. He wanted them to surrender their arms and go with him to Fort Bennett, where they would be fed and clothed. He could make no promises about the future, but he could promise that if they chose to join Big Foot they and perhaps their families too would most certainly be destroyed. The Hunkpapas retired to deliberate. At midnight they laid down their arms and surrendered. The fifty-five Cherry Creek Indians also decided to go to the agency. Early next morning the cavalcade started east. It reached Cheyenne River Agency on the 23d, having en route met Colonel Merriam, at last marching upstream with four companies of his regiment. The Hunkpapas were sent down the Missouri to Fort Sully, where they were held prisoners, and Merriam took station at Cheyenne City to await developments.
On the evening of December 20 Colonel Sumner and his command—C and I Troops, Eighth Cavalry, C Company, Third Infantry, and two Hotchkiss guns—bivouacked at the ranch of Narcisse Narcelle, on the north bank of the Cheyenne, twelve miles above Big Foot's camp. Troop D, Eighth Cavalry, bivouacked six miles in advance. The column moved out next morning and, opposite the abandoned huts of Touch-the-Cloud's village, met Big Foot, one of his lieutenants, and the two Standing Rock Indians who had brought news of Sitting Bull's death. With a show of sternness, Sumner berated the chief for harboring the fugitive Hunkpapas, but moderated when Big Foot pointed out with considerable logic that he could hardly turn away brothers and relatives who came to him hungry, footsore, weary, and nearly naked. Sumner had to agree, for the two Hunkpapas with Big Foot "answered his description perfectly." The colonel then declared that the Miniconjous would have to turn back to their homes. Big Foot agreed. He had already decided on this course anyway, for his people were growing more and more uneasy over the approach of Colonel Merriam's infantry from the east. Escorted by a troop of cavalry, the entire band, together with the Hunkpapa refugees, moved to Narcelle's ranch and made camp, the command forming a chain completely surrounding the Indians. A count showed 333 men, women, and children, including 38 Hunkpapas, of whom 14 were warriors.
The night passed quietly, with the Indians enjoying apparent good humor as a result of the fine feast provided by the soldiers. Early next morning, the 22d, Sumner organized the column for the day's march to Camp Cheyenne, where he planned to hold the Indians under direct observation. He divided the Indian transportation—about fifty wagons with additional travois—into three sections, and had all dismounted people, chiefly women, children, and old men, get into the wagons. Each section, escorted by a troop of cavalry, moved out individually. Big Foot rode in a wagon near the head of the column. The mounted warriors, with Interpreter Felix Benoit, accompanied the third section, and Capt. Philip Reade's infantry brought up the rear. This arrangement, which put the Indians thoroughly under control, made all of them uncomfortable. Some of the young men suddenly appeared with painted faces and carried their Winchesters ostentatiously.
As the second section passed through a gate a few miles from Narcelle's ranch, one of the wagons caught on a fence post and the wheels locked. The frightened women struggled to extricate the vehicle but only succeeded in tangling the horses in their harness. An officer commanded the women to quit blocking the gate, which made things even worse. Black Fox, Big Foot's arrogant son-in-law, brandished his rifle at the officer, who retreated.
Now cut off from the head of the column and incensed at the gruff tone of the officer, the warriors could no longer restrain themselves. They raced aimlessly about, and when the gate was finally cleared they poured through and galloped along the column, shouting and waving their rifles. The women began to throw lodgepoles and cooking utensils from the wagons, preparing for flight if necessary. As the warriors neared the head of the column, Lieutenant Duff faced the advance guard to the rear and spread out a skirmish line, carbines pointed at the oncoming horsemen. The warriors reined in and milled gradually back toward the rear. Sumner meanwhile urged Big Foot to calm his people, and the chief sent messengers to assure them that there was no danger if only they did what the soldiers wanted. The crisis passed, but for the rest of the march everyone was nervous.
As the column crossed the river and neared the cabins of Big Foot's village, the people once more grew excited. Some warriors again dashed toward the head of the column. Fearing a collision, Sumner sent word to Lieutenant Duff to let them pass. Big Foot came to the colonel and said, "I will go with you to your camp, but there will be trouble in trying to force these women and children, cold and hungry as they are, away from their homes. This is their home, where the Government has ordered them to stay, and none of my people have committed a single act requiring their removal by force." Sumner had to admit the logic of this. Wrought up as the young men were, any attempt to make them go on to Camp Cheyenne involved the gravest risk of violence. "I concluded that one of two things must happen," he later explained. "I must either consent to their going into their village or bring on a fight; and, if the latter, must be the aggressor, and, if the aggressor, what possible reason could I produce for making an attack on peaceable, quiet Indians on their reservation and at their homes, killing perhaps many of them and offering, without any justification, the lives of many officers and enlisted men."
Having settled on the former alternative, he now had to decide what to do with Big Foot personally. General Ruger obviously expected Sumner to arrest the chief at the first favorable opportunity. Yet Ruger's facts were outdated. The danger now resided not so much in Big Foot, one of the most moderate individuals in the camp, as in his headstrong young men. To Sumner, Big Foot himself seemed by far the best instrument for keeping the peace, and to remove his restraining influence at this critical time appeared the height of folly. The colonel therefore told Big Foot that his people could go to their homes, and that he himself could remain with them if he promised to come to Camp Cheyenne the next day for a council and to bring all the Standing Rock people with him. Big Foot gave his promise. By now the column had reached the village, and wagons were already turning off to the various cabins. Sumner saw that he had made the only possible decision, for he could not have reformed the column by any means short of opening fire. The troops continued to Camp Cheyenne, arriving early in the evening.
General Miles had now set up headquarters in Rapid City and assumed command of all units in Dakota, thus doing away with the awkward relationship arising from Brooke's operating in Ruger's department. A wire from Miles reached Sumner by courier from Fort Meade during the night of the 22d. It alerted him to rumors that 200 Indians were loose in western North Dakota, and that they had a troop of cavalry corralled. Miles thought the reports unfounded (they were) but wanted Sumner to screen the settlements on the northern edge of the Black Hills in case the reports turned out to be true. Therefore, directed Miles, "I think you had better push on rapidly with your prisoners to Meade, and be careful they do not escape, and look out for other Indians."
The hard fact, of course, was that Sumner had no prisoners, and he had already, as soon as he reached camp late in the afternoon, admitted this in a message to Miles. Early on the morning of the 23d Sumner sent another dispatch to Miles declaring that if Big Foot did not keep his promise and come in during the day, the cavalry would march down and take him. He sent scouts to find out if all was well at Big Foot's camp. Noon came and went with no sign of Big Foot and no word from the scouts.
The colonel pondered his predicament over lunch. With the possibility of hostiles sweeping down from the north, his command might have fresh work ahead of it, work that would be much hampered by the necessity of watching Big Foot. He could seize Big Foot, as Miles expected and in fact thought had already been done, but this would surely provoke a fight and, even if successful, unleash the impulsive young men to prey on the countryside. He continued to believe that the best insurance against trouble lay in Big Foot's remaining with his people. The only way out of the dilemma, Sumner gradually concluded, was to persuade Big Foot to go to his agency at the mouth of Cheyenne River. Then the garrison of Fort Bennett could have the responsibility of watching him. "All thought of these Indians going south had been abandoned by me," Sumner declared later, "and I supposed they would either go peaceably to the agency or fight."
While Sumner ate, a rancher named John Dunn came to his tent peddling eggs and butter. Dunn had lived on the Belle Fourche, a few miles from Camp Cheyenne, for ten years and knew Big Foot well. The Indians called him "Red Beard." Sumner asked Dunn to ride to Big Foot's camp and try to persuade him to take the people to Cheyenne River Agency. Dunn demurred but at length gave in to the colonel's entreaties. As the rancher rode off, Sumner had the orderly trumpeter sound "boots and saddles," and soon the whole command was trotting down the valley toward Big Foot's village.
Felix Benoit, the interpreter, accompanied Dunn. As they entered the outskirts of the Miniconjou village, they met the two Indian scouts sent out earlier by Sumner. Benoit stopped to talk with them, while Dunn went on into the village. Benoit asked the scouts why Big Foot had not come in as promised. They answered that the Standing Rock Indians had fled, and Big Foot did not want to face the colonel until he had found them. Accompanied by the scouts, the interpreter rode on into the camp. At Big Foot's cabin they found a throng of excited men milling around Dunn and the chief. "I am ordered to go down to Bennett to-morrow morning," shouted Big Foot to his men. "We must all go to Bennett; if we don't, John Dunn is sent here to tell me that if we don't go the soldiers will come here in the morning and make us go, and shoot us if they have to." Seeing Benoit, Big Foot asked if Dunn told the truth. Yes, replied Benoit.
After Benoit, Dunn, and the scouts had departed, Big Foot and his men heatedly discussed the next move. Some thought they ought to go to the agency; others wanted to accept the invitation from the Oglala chiefs and go to Pine Ridge; still others, including Big Foot, favored staying in their homes and awaiting developments. But Sumner's soldiers were approaching from upstream and Merriam's from downstream. This certainly seemed to bear out Dunn's ominous prophecy. ("I know this," Captain Henissee later remarked, "Indians don't care what you say, but are suspicious of actions.") The argument was finally resolved with the decision to move up Deep Creek into the hills and from there to watch to see if the soldiers really were coming.
As the Indians began to round up their ponies and load their wagons for this move, Benoit, glancing back at the village, remarked that the camp must be preparing to start for Bennett right away. Sending one of the scouts back to watch, he and Dunn continued up the river. They found Sumner camped about five miles above the village. Later, the scout came in and reported that the women and children were badly frightened, and it looked as if the band planned to leave for the agency immediately. Sumner promptly sent three scouts to tell Big Foot not to go until morning. One soon returned with word that the Indians had already left, but were moving south. Either they intended to go to Bennett by the ridge road, hoping thereby to avoid Merriam's command on the valley road, or they were breaking for Pine Ridge; he did not know which. Sumner's scouts laced the country during the night, while the colonel hoped against hope that Big Foot would turn east on the ridge road to the agency.
That night, in the hills south of the village, the Indians debated the question in council. The headmen all urged Big Foot to strike south for Pine Ridge, as requested by the Oglala chiefs, and there make the peace that would earn him 100 ponies. Big Foot resisted. He had assured Sumner over and over that his people had no intention of going south. Besides, he did not feel well, and the long journey would be hard for him. As long as they had to leave their homes, he preferred Bennett to Pine Ridge. His advisers, fearing a trap, would not yield. He must go to Pine Ridge. Big Foot finally gave in, and the band pointed south. At midnight one of Sumner's scouts, Charging First, caught up with the procession. Tell Sumner, said Big Foot, that he, Big Foot, wanted to go to Bennett, but that his people would not let him. They demanded that he lead them to Pine Ridge, and lead them he would.
The next morning, December 24, Sumner had this report. He crossed the river to the deserted village but, still worried about the reports of hostiles to the north, did not follow Big Foot's trail. Instead, he returned to Camp Cheyenne. This same day a courier rode in from Fort Meade with a telegram from General Miles:
Rapid City, [December] 23d.
To Col. E. V. Sumner,
Commanding Cheyenne:
(Through Commanding Officer Fort Meade.)
Report about hostile Indians near Little Missouri not believed. The attitude of Big Foot has been defiant and hostile, and you are authorized to arrest him or any of his people and to take them to Meade or Bennett. There are some 30 young warriors that run [ _sic_ ] away from Hump's camp without authority, and if an opportunity is given they will undoubtedly join those in the Bad Lands. The Standing Rock Indians also have no right to be there and they should be arrested. The division commander directs, therefore, that you secure Big Foot and the 20 [ _sic_ ] Cheyenne River Indians, and the Standing Rock Indians, and if necessary round up the whole camp and disarm them, and take them to Fort Meade or Bennett.
. . . .
By command of Gen. Miles.
Maus,
Captain and Aide-de-Camp.
News of Big Foot's escape touched off a wrathful explosion in Miles' headquarters, and the general's anger resounded in dispatches going to all field commanders. Within a month he had sent his inspector general, Maj. J. Ford Kent, to Camp Cheyenne to assemble evidence with which to bring Sumner before a court of inquiry. Fortunately for the colonel, Kent concluded that the evidence did not warrant court proceedings. Sumner was saved by the fact that he received no _direct_ order to arrest Big Foot until December 24, by which time it was too late.
One sympathizes with Sumner. Miles and Ruger assumed that Big Foot was personally dangerous, an assumption that Sumner's experience belied. They assumed, too, that all would be well with the Miniconjous if only Big Foot were withdrawn from their midst, another assumption contradicted by Sumner's firsthand experience. The evidence points to the conclusion that these assumptions were indeed wrong, and that circumstances conspired to frustrate a basically sound policy.
Yet, from December 17 on, Sumner knew without question that Big Foot was his personal responsibility. Thus his decision on the 22d to leave Big Foot unguarded must have been a calculated risk taken in full knowledge that his future career might hang on the good faith of the chief. Even after receiving Miles' telegram on the evening of the 22d, in which the division commander presumed that Big Foot and his people had already been made prisoners, Sumner equivocated for another twenty-four hours, by which time it was too late. Perhaps, as he contended, it would have been folly, with only 200 men, to attempt to interfere with Big Foot and his band. But it was folly, too, to withdraw completely and leave everything to the hope that Big Foot would or could keep his promises. As it turned out, the consequences were indeed tragic.
In military life as in no other, results are what count. Sumner failed to produce.
## _11. THE SEARCH FOR THE MINICONJOUS_
GENERAL MILES' anger over the escape of Big Foot is understandable. Consistent with his earlier assumptions about Big Foot, he logically assumed that the Miniconjous were running for the Stronghold, where they hoped to join Short Bull and Kicking Bear. It was an awkward time, for General Brooke's latest peace effort was just getting under way. The friendly chiefs at Pine Ridge had met in council on the 16th and 17th and had decided to send 500 men into the Stronghold for one final, massive attempt at persuading the hostiles to avert bloodshed by giving up. This imposing delegation had just arrived at the destination, and had sent back encouraging reports, when word came that Big Foot had broken away and was heading south. If he succeeded in reaching the Stronghold, war might yet erupt. Accordingly, all energies went into the search for the Miniconjous. The first hope lay with Colonel Carr's Sixth Cavalry, whose three squadrons were ranging east and west from the base camp at the mouth of Rapid Creek.
Full-bearded Eugene A. Carr was a scarred veteran of frontier warfare who traced his career back to the old Regiment of Mounted Riflemen in the years before the Civil War. Few colonels of cavalry in 1890 boasted a longer, more active role in the conquest of the western Indians; none boasted a brighter star on his battle record than his for Summit Springs. The order to move to Dakota had caught the Sixth Cavalry scattered over much of Arizona and New Mexico. Added to the vexations of the journey, the thankless task of patrolling the wintry plains north of White River put Carr in a crotchety frame of mind. Especially annoying were reports of the easy life that the Seventh Cavalry, under Forsyth, "a junior colonel," was enjoying at Pine Ridge Agency. Carr's complaints offer a rare insight into some of the personal sacrifices demanded by frontier service and deserve to be quoted in part:
I do not suppose any one ever worked harder than I and my Regiment have done since November 24th when I suddenly received a telegram that I was transferred to the Department of the Platte.
This is the fourth week I have been on the jump day and night. My Quartermaster had to stay to turn over [property], and I have done much of his duties.
We packed all our impedimenta in eight days, and were ready always before the Railroad was.
Now we have no station or place for our families.
We were told they could stay at Wingate [New Mexico], but I would not leave any officers or soldiers to care for them, and they would have been lost among strangers; who would be constantly looking for them to vacate quarters, to which the new garrison was entitled, having been moved as suddenly as we were. We were offered some quarters at Forts Snelling [Minnesota] and Randall [South Dakota], which was a mockery! as it would cost more to go there and thence to new posts than to board, so they came on except such as scattered, and some are at Rapid City awaiting developments.
Forgive me for boring you with all this, but my Regiment worked well for you in Arizona, through the heat and sands, mostly without tents, and is ready and willing to work again.
I had similar luck with the 5th Cavalry in '76.
Crook got it "temporarily assigned" to Department [of the] Platte and never let it go.
We lived on horse meat or nothing, and shivered and suffered in this very neighborhood till in the winter, and when we went into quarters they would not even order an officer to see to the bringing of our effects.
I had a trunk broken open, silver stolen, etc. etc.
I hope you will give us a fair show in this scrap. I understand the 7th [Cavalry] has a beautiful camp at Pine Ridge, all laid out according to the Regulations and everything in Apple pie order.
Now Carr had his opportunity to do some serious work. At 10:00 A.M. on December 24, the morning after Big Foot's flight, a courier galloped into the camp at the mouth of Rapid Creek with a message from Colonel Sumner. It alerted Carr that Big Foot was headed south, up Deep Creek, and would probably pass the head of Bull Creek sometime during the night. If Carr marched swiftly to the east, he might get in front of the Miniconjous. Only four troops of the Sixth were in camp, but within half an hour after "boots and saddles" had sounded they were pushing eastward with two Hotchkiss guns bringing up the rear.
By evening the column had reached the middle fork of Sage Creek, on the northern edge of the forbidding, eroded formations of the South Dakota Badlands. Camped in these eerie surroundings, the command passed a memorable Christmas Eve. "The night," recalled one of the officers, "was very cold and the alkaline pools in the vicinity were frozen solid. Those who had brought any food divided with the others as far as possible, but Christmas morning dawned upon a lot of half-frozen, uncomfortable men who had spent a cheerless night, alternately heaping wood on the fires and then trying to sleep on saddle blankets."
Another troop of the regiment rode into camp early in the evening, and still another, having marched from its position at Harney Spring, east of the Stronghold, came in at 2:30 A.M. on Christmas Day. Carr promptly sent its guide, Gus Craven, southward to find the two troops under Maj. Emil Adam patrolling White River Valley. On the chance that Big Foot had already slipped around him, Carr wanted Adam's squadron moved up White River in order to cut off any attempt by the Miniconjous to enter the Stronghold from the northeast. The Badlands Wall, an escarpment some 300 feet high bordering White River on the north for a distance of nearly ninety miles, limited the choice of routes open to Big Foot, for only a few passes afforded convenient exit from the Badlands. Craven descended the Wall by way of Sage Creek Pass and at daylight found Major Adam camped between the mouths of Red Water and Medicine Root Creeks. Upon receipt of the message, Adam mounted his command and marched up White River Valley.
As Sumner had emphasized that Big Foot would probably cross the head of Bull Creek, Carr divided his six troops into two squadrons and on the 25th swept northward on a wide front toward Bull Creek. Crossing this stream, he pushed almost to the head of Deep Creek without discovering any sign of Indians. There could be little doubt that Big Foot by now had dropped far to the south, for he had been on Deep Creek two days earlier. Carr therefore called off the chase and returned to his base camp.
Big Foot had passed to the east of Carr. He had traveled swiftly during the night of the 23d. Dawn found the band on a branch of Bad River; noon, on a second fork of Bad River. The sun shone brightly as the Indian column penetrated the sterile Badlands, but a raw, cold wind whipped clouds of alkali dust across the file of wagons. Big Foot lay in his own wagon, feeling ill, but the pace did not slacken. Late in the afternoon the wagons came to the Badlands Wall at a pass (six miles west of the present headquarters of Badlands National Monument) that had long since fallen into disuse. A tortuous trail, pocked and gullied by erosion, led down to the valley of White River. The men swarmed to the front and with axes and spades quickly made the trail passable. (The pass is still known as Big Foot Pass.) The wagons wound down the slope, and by nightfall the band was camped on the south bank of the river.
The Indians had eluded Carr but were camped only a few miles down the river from Major Adam's squadron of the Sixth. This threat vanished next morning, however, when Gus Craven brought Adam the order from Carr to move farther up the river. Christmas Eve, while camped on White River, Big Foot was prostrated by pneumonia, and the flight of the Miniconjous slowed almost to a crawl. This sudden change of pace further upset the calculations of the military authorities who were frantically trying to find him.
Leaving three pickets to watch White River for pursuing soldiers, the band moved slowly to Cedar Spring (now Big Foot Spring) on the 25th. From here, the failing Big Foot dispatched three messengers to ride ahead and inform the Pine Ridge chiefs of his approach. They were to say that he was coming openly and peaceably and was very sick. The next day the fugitives traveled only four miles, halting on Red Water Creek.
Units from Pine Ridge had now joined the search. On the 25th, Maj. Guy V. Henry and four troops of the Ninth Cavalry—Henry's Brunettes—took station at Harney Spring to cover all approaches to the Stronghold from the east. Only a half-dozen miles to the west, Little Wound, Big Road, and Fast Thunder, with Brooke's delegation of 500 friendlies, were trying to persuade the disciples of Short Bull and Kicking Bear to surrender. Runners to Brooke reported dissension again sweeping the hostiles. Two days after his arrival at Harney Spring, December 27, Major Henry sent his guide William D. McGaa, with a few scouts, to work into some point of vantage from which they could observe the activities in the Stronghold. The scouts came in that evening to report all tepees struck and the hostiles leaving the tableland in the direction of the agency. The next day Henry moved down to White River, opposite the mouth of Wounded Knee Creek, but had McGaa go back for another look. This time the scouts found the Stronghold deserted. Short Bull and Kicking Bear were headed for the agency with their entire following.
Big Foot's couriers probably reported to the chiefs at Pine Ridge on the morning of December 26, for Brooke heard around noon that the Miniconjous had crossed White River and were somewhere in the vicinity of Porcupine Creek, destined not for the Stronghold but for the agency. Concluding that Big Foot had given up the attempt to get into the Stronghold, the general immediately ordered out a squadron of the Seventh Cavalry. "I do not think there will be any mistake made with Big Foot if we get him," Brooke wired Miles. "My orders were to dismount [him] and destroy his arms and hold him when caught for my orders."
Miles heartily approved. "Big Foot is cunning and his Indians are very bad," he replied the same day. "And I hope you will round up the whole body of them, disarm [them] and keep them under close guard." Another telegram, reflecting Miles' mounting concern, followed almost immediately: "I have no doubt your orders are all right, but I shall be exceedingly anxious till I know they are executed; whoever secures that body of Indians will be entitled to much credit. They deceived Sumner completely, and if they get a chance they will scatter through the entire Sioux camp or slip out individually."
The mission had been entrusted to capable hands. Seasoned by arduous campaigns against the Apaches, Maj. Samuel Marmaduke Whitside had learned much about Indian fighting. With Troops A, B, I, and K of Custer's old regiment and a platoon of Battery E, First Artillery, two Hotchkiss guns, commanded by Lt. Harry L. Hawthorne, he pitched camp in the evening near the Wounded Knee trading post. The trader, Louis Mosseau, had taken refuge at the agency a month earlier. Now he came back with the soldiers, opened the store, and turned over part of his house, behind the store, to Major Whitside and his officers.
The next morning, the 27th, Whitside sent out a party of Oglala Indian scouts under John Shangreau, chief of Brooke's headquarters scouts, to scour the valleys of Wounded Knee and Porcupine Creeks for signs of Big Foot. They searched diligently, for General Brooke had promised twenty-five dollars to the scout who found Big Foot, and the reporters, exasperated by the lack of good copy, had doubled the incentive. By late in the morning a line of heliographs had been set up to connect the Wounded Knee camp with Pine Ridge, and flashing mirrors brought further instructions from Brooke's aide-de-camp: "I am directed by the Commanding General to say that he thinks Big Foot's party must be in your front somewhere, and that you must make every effort to find him and then move on him at once and with rapidity. There must be a solution reached at the earliest possible moment. Find his trail and follow, or find his hiding place and capture him. If he fights, destroy him."
This same morning of December 27 found the Miniconjous still camped on Red Water Creek, Big Foot's pneumonia growing steadily worse. During the night one of the messengers sent to Pine Ridge on the 25th had returned with news that soldiers were on Wounded Knee Creek, where the road from Pine Ridge to Rosebud crossed the stream. Now, two more Indians rode into camp. They were Bear-Comes-and-Lies, another of the messengers, and Shaggy Feather, an Oglala from Pine Ridge. They reported that the Indians in the Stronghold had at last been persuaded to give up and would reach Pine Ridge in two days, on December 29. Short Bull and Kicking Bear had learned of Big Foot's approach and wanted him to time his marches so as to reach the agency on the same day. The two emissaries also brought word of the soldiers on Wounded Knee and advised Big Foot to avoid them by swinging to the east and south before turning toward the agency. Big Foot replied that he was too sick. The best course was to go directly to the camp of the soldiers. The Miniconjous moved out at noon, paused for supper on Medicine Root Creek where the town of Kyle now stands, then pushed on to American Horse Creek. At midnight they made camp next to the log school building near Little Wound's deserted village.
At sunrise on the 28th the band resumed the journey and by late morning had crossed the divide separating American Horse from Porcupine Creek. Descending the slope to Porcupine, a party of warriors riding in advance spied four of Whitside's scouts watering their horses in the stream. They were Baptiste Garnier (Little Bat), his half-brother, Old Hand, and two Oglala scouts. Taken off guard, they found themselves suddenly surrounded by the Miniconjou warriors. The wagons had now come up, and the people scattered along the stream bank to eat lunch. The scouts were taken to Big Foot, reclining in his wagon. The chief said he wanted Old Hand and one of the Oglala scouts to take word to the commander on Wounded Knee that the Miniconjous were coming directly to his camp.
Old Hand and his companion reached Whitside's camp just as the command was preparing to eat lunch. They told their story to John Shangreau, who went promptly with the report to Whitside. The major had "boots and saddles" sounded and made ready to leave at once. Shangreau objected. "Major," he said, "Big Foot told the men that he was going to come to the camp and we may as well stay here till they come." But Whitside pointed out the Major Henry's squadron of the Ninth was operating somewhere to the north, and the possibility of a collision between these troops and the Miniconjous could not be chanced. Probably, also, Whitside recalled that Big Foot had made a similar promise to Colonel Sumner and while Sumner waited had struck out in the opposite direction. The safest course was to march out to meet the Miniconjous and escort them back to camp.
About noon the four troops moved out at a trot. There were 10 officers and 225 enlisted men, including Hawthorne's artillery. By 2:00 P.M. they had covered eight miles and had reached a dry wash, Pine Creek, that meandered among pine-studded hills at the foot of Porcupine Butte. Beyond the next ridge lay the valley of Porcupine Creek, where Old Hand had left the Indians eating lunch. Two horsemen galloped down the slope toward the column. Little Bat and his Oglala companion had been released by Big Foot. As they reined up in front of Major Whitside, the first of the Miniconjou cavalcade crawled into view on top of the ridge two miles distant. "How does it look with those Indians?" asked John Shangreau. "They look pretty tough," answered Little Bat. "We are liable to catch it today."
The squadron continued the march for another mile, then halted. The Indians had moved part way down the side of the ridge, mounted warriors to the front. Whitside signaled the column into skirmish formation, gave the command to dismount, and ran the two cannon out in front of the line. Horse-holders grabbed the reins of led horses and withdrew to the rear. The Miniconjous kept coming. Their men fanned out on a wide front, forming an animated skirmish line. Some of the warriors tied up the tails of their ponies in preparation for a fight; others raced back and forth waving rifles. Behind them, a white flag fluttered from a pole fixed to Big Foot's wagon.
The Indians stopped, facing the soldiers. Two footmen started toward the blue line. Shangreau rode out to meet them, then accompanied them back to Big Foot's wagon. In a moment the wagon moved through the warriors and drew up next to Whitside. He peered in. Big Foot lay in the bed of the wagon, only a small part of his face showing from the blankets that swathed him from head to foot. Blood dripped from his nose, staining the blankets and collecting in small pools that froze on the floor of the wagon. The warriors, still in line, milled around nervously. An occasional metallic click signified the chambering of a cartridge. A few warriors on the right flank rode out toward the troops. Big Foot had told them not to be afraid, but to go calmly among the soldiers. Dewey Horn Cloud (later named Dewey Beard) rode right up to one of the cannon and thrust his hand into the muzzle—because, he later explained, he was anxious to die.
As Whitside reached down to shake hands with Big Foot, more warriors clustered around the wagon. With Shangreau interpreting, Whitside told Big Foot that he must bring his people to the camp on Wounded Knee Creek. "All right," was the faltering reply, "I am going there." He also explained that he was headed for Pine Ridge Agency, where he intended to make a peace and earn 100 horses. "John," said the major to Shangreau, "I want the horses and guns." The scout protested: "Look here, Major, if you do that there is liable to be a fight here; and if there is you will kill all those women and children and the men will get away from you." Whitside explained that General Brooke's orders were to disarm and dismount the Indians. "Well, that might be it," replied Shangreau, "but we better take them to camp and then take their horses from them and their guns." Whitside thought a moment, then said, "All right; you tell Big Foot to move down to camp at Wounded Knee." Shangreau translated, and Big Foot answered, "All right, I am going down to camp; that is where I am going."
Again the two men shook hands. Whitside said that the springless wagon in which Big Foot had been riding made the journey too hard, and he motioned an ambulance forward. Soldiers grasped the blankets and gently transferred him to the Army vehicle. The cavalrymen remounted and herded the warriors into a compact group behind the wagons. Two troops of cavalry led the march, followed by the ambulance, the string of Indian wagons, and the mounted warriors. The other two troops and Hawthorne's cannon brought up the rear. The column pointed southwest, toward Wounded Knee.
A courier galloped in advance, headed for camp. He took word for General Brooke that Big Foot and his entire following had been intercepted. There were 120 men and 230 women and children. Whitside suggested that Colonel Forsyth and the rest of the regiment be sent out to Wounded Knee to help in the disarming. "The object I had in view," Whitside later testified, "was that, by their presence, we could overawe the Indians, and so they would submit quietly to be disarmed. I was convinced, from a hostile demonstration at the time of surrender, that otherwise trouble might ensue."
The message, relayed from Wounded Knee by heliograph, reached Brooke late in the afternoon. He at once alerted Forsyth to prepare to march. Then the general, elated at the turn of events, telegraphed the good news to Miles, at the same time suggesting that, as soon as disarmed, the prisoners be marched directly from Wounded Knee to the railroad at Gordon, Nebraska, from where they could be moved by train to Omaha. From Miles came a prompt reply: "All right. Use force enough. Congratulations."
At 4:40 P.M. Troops C, D, E, and G of the Seventh Cavalry, the troop of Oglala scouts under Lts. Charles W. Taylor and Guy H. Preston, and the other platoon of Light Battery E, First Artillery, under Capt. Allyn Capron, formed for the march to Wounded Knee. Colonel Forsyth reported to General Brooke for orders. They were verbal, and as recalled in substance by Brooke were: "To disarm Big Foot's band, take every precaution to prevent the escape of any; [and] if they fought to destroy them." After disarming the Miniconjous, Forsyth and the First Squadron were to return to the agency. Whitside and the Second Squadron were to hold the Indians on Wounded Knee until ordered to march them to the railroad. The command, with an absolute minimum of baggage, faced east and trotted out of the agency.
Shortly afterward, near sunset, Major Whitside and his prisoners reached their destination. The valley here was 300 to 500 yards wide. Wounded Knee Creek meandered northward close to the base of a high ridge bordering the valley on the east. On the other side, marking its western limit, two ridges pointed east. Separating them, a dry ravine snaked eastward across the valley and emptied into the creek. The road from Porcupine Creek, on which the Miniconjous and their escort were traveling, descended the slope on the east and crossed Wounded Knee Creek by means of a bridge, then passed the Wounded Knee Post Office and Mosseau's store and ran southward across the dry ravine before curving to the west, toward the agency. About 150 yards south of the bridge, midway between the store and the ravine, rows of cavalry tents edged the road on the west. They extended to the base of a low hill, the point of the northernmost ridge on the west side of the valley. Bull Eagle lived in a cabin on top of this knob. The Indians killed in the Battle of Wounded Knee were later buried here, and it has since taken the name of Cemetery Hill.
As Whitside's column crossed the bridge, some of the Indians turned aside to Mosseau's store, where they bought candles, coffee, sugar, and a few other supplies. The rest, following the directions of the soldiers, continued down the road past the military camp and halted on the north edge of the ravine. As finally pitched, their tepees extended in an arc from the agency road at the ravine crossing to the southern base of Cemetery Hill, a distance of about 250 yards. Whitside promptly posted Hawthorne's two Hotchkiss guns on top of Cemetery Hill, their muzzles pointed in enfilade at the Indian camp. He also instructed Capt. Myles Moylan, officer of the day, to station his own troop, A, and Capt. Henry J. Nowlan's Troop I as sentinels around the Indian camp. Moylan established twenty posts entirely circling the Miniconjou village, with patrols ranging back and forth between the fixed stations. At the south edge of the cavalry camp, where the scouts had set up their own tent, a large conical affair, Whitside had another erected for Big Foot's use. It was a roomy wall tent, heated by a camp stove. Assistant Surgeon James D. Glennan, with Little Bat interpreting, attended the sick chief.
The rest of the regiment arrived about 8:30 P.M., and Colonel Forsyth assumed command from Major Whitside. The reinforcements took a circuitous route east of the road in order to reach the military camp without alarming the Indians. The additional cavalry, having brought no tents, bivouacked just north of Whitside's camp. Forsyth sent Captain Capron and his two Hotchkiss guns to join Hawthorne on top of Cemetery Hill, and Capron assumed command of the artillery. Lieutenant Taylor's Oglala scouts bivouacked on the south side of the ravine, opposite the Miniconjou camp.
The officers of the Seventh Cavalry had a jolly time that night. James Asay, the Pine Ridge trader, had loaded a keg of whisky on a wagon and had come out with Forsyth. Until late in the night, the officers celebrated the capture of Big Foot. From the reports of this merriment sprang the accusation that the troops were drunk during the battle of the 29th, but witnesses of the evening's festivities pointed out that the enlisted men did not share in the revelry, and that no officer showed any signs of intoxication the next morning. The military camp finally quieted down as all not on duty turned to their blankets. Little Bat and Father Francis Craft, an extroverted Catholic missionary who had ridden out with Forsyth, walked over to Louis Mosseau's house. Next morning, Mosseau awoke to find both men in bed with him.
The Miniconjous slept somewhat less soundly. Although Forsyth had tried to keep them from knowing about his arrival with more soldiers, Taylor's scouts had called across the ravine to their kinsmen and given them the news. Throughout the night the Indians, uncertain about the morrow and deeply suspicious of the soldiers, grew steadily more uneasy. With fear and foreboding, they greeted the chill dawn.
## _12. WOUNDED KNEE_
COL. JAMES W. FORSYTH had commanded the Seventh Cavalry since 1886. With square chin, piercing eyes under heavy brows, iron-gray hair, and neat mustache, he looked every bit a cavalry colonel. He brought to the regiment a distinguished record in the Civil War—major general of volunteers and a string of brevets in the Regular Army up to brigadier general— but he had very little command experience in Indian campaigning. During the heavy fighting of the 1870s, he had served on the staff of Lt. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, first as aide-de-camp, later as military secretary. As General Miles was quick to point out after the Wounded Knee catastrophe upset his carefully laid plans, Forsyth "had never exercised command in any engagement with Indians, with the exception of a skirmish between his advance guard and a small party of Bannocks, July 20, 1878.". This made no difference to the colonel's officers and men. They liked and respected him, and almost to a man they lined up behind him when he came under fire from General Miles.
On the morning of December 29, 1890, Forsyth's regiment numbered 413 enlisted men (229 in the First Squadron, 181 in the Second, 3 in regimental headquarters) and 25 officers—a total of 438. The artillery was manned by 20 men and 2 officers; and probably about 30 Oglalas made up Taylor's troop of Indian scouts. In all, Forsyth had a little more than 500 effectives, organized as follows:
SEVENTH U.S. CAVALRY
_Regimental Headquarters_
Col. James W. Forsyth
1st Lt. L. S. McCormick, Adjutant
1st Lt. Ezra B. Fuller, Quartermaster
Capt. & Asst. Surgeon J. Van R. Hoff, Medical Director
1st Lt. & Asst. Surgeon James D. Glennan, Medical Officer
Veterinary Surgeon Daniel LeMay
Three Noncommissioned Staff Officers
_First Squadron_
Maj. Samuel M. Whitside
1st Lt. W. J. Nicholson, Adjutant
Troop A—Capt. Myles Moylan; 1st Lt. Ernest A. Garlington
Troop B—Capt. Charles A. Varnum; 1st Lt. John C. Gresham
Troop I—Capt. Henry J. Nowlan; 2d Lt. John C. Waterman
Troop K—Capt. George D. Wallace; 1st Lt. James D. Mann
_Second Squadron_
Capt. Charles S. Ilsley
1st Lt. W. W. Robinson, Jr., Adjutant
Troop C—Capt. Henry Jackson; 2d Lt. T. Q. Donaldson
Troop D—Capt. Edward S. Godfrey; 2d Lt. S. R. H. Tompkins
Troop E—1st Lt. Horatio G. Sickel; 2d Lt. Sedgwick Rice
Troop G—Capt. Winfield S. Edgerly; 1st Lt. Edwin P. Brewer
LIGHT BATTERY E, FIRST U.S. ARTILLERY
Capt. Allyn Capron, First Artillery
2d Lt. Harry L. Hawthorne, Second Artillery (attached)
Four Hotchkiss Breech-Loading Steel Mountain Rifles, caliber 1.65 inches; length of bore, 24.72 calibers; weight of tube, 116.6 pounds; weight of carriage, 220 pounds; weight of exploding cartridge, 2 pounds 10 ounces; effective range, 4,200 yards. The battery was divided into two platoons of two guns each. Capron commanded one, Hawthorne the other.
TROOP A, INDIAN SCOUTS
1st Lt. Charles W. Taylor, Ninth U.S. Cavalry
2d Lt. Guy H. Preston, Ninth U.S. Cavalry
On the whole, the officers were experienced and capable professionals. Seven troop commanders of the Seventh Cavalry—Moylan, Jackson, Varnum, Nowlan, Wallace, Godfrey, and Edgerly— had been in the regiment since Custer's time, and all but Jackson and Nowlan had fought at the Little Bighorn. Two of the troop commanders, Godfrey and Edgerly (as well as Forsyth and Whitside) later became generals. Allyn Capron, a "huge, powerful man with a voice like a bull," knew how to get the most out of both men and cannon. The enlisted men were another matter. Except for a hard core of seasoned noncommissioned officers, most of the men had never been under fire. Of the regiment, 81—nearly one-fifth—were recruits, and of these, 38 had joined the regiment at Pine Ridge only two weeks earlier. The soldiers were armed with Springfield single-shot carbines and Colt revolvers. Taylor's Oglala scouts had been enlisted for scouting. At that they were good, but they could hardly be relied upon to do much fighting against their Miniconjou brethren. The command was not, therefore, a force of veteran fighters.
In addition, two other officers, 1st Lt. John Kenzie, Second Infantry, and Assistant Surgeon Charles B. Ewing, had come out from the agency to watch the proceedings. A miscellaneous assortment of civilians rounded out the complement of whites. Among them were Interpreter Philip Wells, attached to Taylor's scouts; Father Francis M. J. Craft; Scouts John Shangreau and Little Bat; and three newspapermen, Charles W. Allen of the Chadron (Nebraska) _Democrat_ , William F. Kelley of the _Nebraska State Journal_ (Lincoln), and Will Cressey of the Omaha _Daily Bee_. The rest of the correspondents, including the reporter-artist for _Harper's Weekly_ , Frederic Remington, who had reached Pine Ridge the day before, had decided that the big news would be made at the agency, for the Indians from the Stronghold were expected to come in and surrender at any moment.
The Miniconjous who awoke in the village adjacent to the cavalry camp that morning numbered the same as had surrendered to Whitside the day before, 120 men and 230 women and children. The men were armed with a variety of weapons, some of them relics of the Custer fight, but the testimony of many participants, including Indians, leaves no doubt that a large number carried Winchester repeating rifles or carbines.
Forsyth's orders from Brooke were to disarm the Miniconjous and send them, under escort of the First Squadron, to the railroad for movement to Omaha. Neither he nor any of his officers considered armed resistance to such overwhelming force anything but a remote possibility. His plan, therefore, was to place the troops of the Second Squadron, mounted, in positions on three sides of the Indians, and hold his First Squadron, dismounted, in reserve close by on the fourth side for any special task that the actual disarming might require. Such a display of might would reinforce the already obvious fact that resistance invited destruction.
After reveille, while more rations were distributed to the Indians, the colonel briefed Major Whitside and Captain Ilsley on his plan and explained the positions he wanted them to take. At 7:30 the two squadrons turned out. Of the First Squadron, two troops, A and I, had spent the night on guard duty and were still in position around the Indian village. B and K Troops, however, formed in front of the officers' tents at the head of the unit streets. Their horses remained tethered at the picket line in the camp. The Second Squadron formed on horseback at the bivouac north of the tents. Troop E then took station on a hill just west of the battery and supporting it. Troop G drew up east of the agency road facing the Indian village. C and D Troops deployed in a long rank across the valley south of the ravine. About fifty yards to their front, Taylor's scouts formed another mounted line, and in front of the scouts a third line, dismounted sentinels from the night guard, occupied the brow of the ravine. This line extended around the west flank of the village and also around the east flank, on the agency road. The guard reserve, about one-third of A and I Troops, gathered on foot with Captain Moylan near the base of Cemetery Hill, to the east of the artillery. As the Indian men were to be assembled at Big Foot's tent, on the south edge of Whitside's camp, and there disarmed, B and K Troops remained in formation at the head of their streets waiting for whatever employment the situation might demand. None of the soldiers was more than 300 yards from the Indians.
Forsyth had sent John Shangreau to summon the Indian men to Big Foot's tent, and at the scout's instigation the camp crier, Wounded Hand, began to circulate among the tepees announcing that the soldier chief wished to have a council with the men.
This intensified the uneasiness that had distressed the people since the night before, when they had learned that more soldiers had arrived on Wounded Knee. At no time after the surrender to Whitside on the 28th, however, had the Miniconjous as a group considered armed resistance. They wanted only to appease the soldiers and get started on the final leg of the journey to, so they believed, Pine Ridge. But now the awful truth dawned that their guns were to be taken. Even so, there was still no deliberate intent to fight for them. As all could plainly see, such a course could only result in annihilation. Yet the actual disarming could be expected to turn loose some intense emotions. Not only was the rifle numbered among the most treasured possessions of an Indian, but, one and all, the Miniconjous could not shake the fear that if they gave up their guns they would be slaughtered by the troops. It was an unreasonable and unjustified fear, but a very real one. It explains what was soon to happen.
While the troops were making their way to assigned positions at about 8:00 A.M., some of the Indian men, heeding the camp crier, walked over to where Forsyth stood with a knot of officers and civilians, including the reporters, in front of Big Foot's tent. Inside, Dr. Hoff attended the prostrate chief, whose wife hovered nearby. It was a restless, uncooperative group that confronted the colonel. It fluctuated in size as the men milled back and forth between the village and the council site. Through Shangreau, Forsyth tried to get the men together and settled quietly in one place so that he could state his demands.
Finally, Forsyth, Whitside, and Shangreau herded the men into a rough, crowded line facing the cavalry camp, the center opposite the entrance to Big Foot's tent. With Shangreau interpreting, the colonel spoke pleasantly to them, explaining why their arms must be surrendered and assuring them, in the words of Father Craft, "that they were perfectly safe in the hands of their old friends the soldiers, and that starvation and other troubles were now happily at an end."
The Indians immediately began talking among themselves and at length decided to send two men to confer with Big Foot. Shangreau went along. Inside the tent, they explained what the soldiers wanted and asked what they should do. Give up the bad guns, advised Big Foot, and keep the good ones. Shangreau interceded. "You better give up the guns," he warned, "you can buy guns, but if you lose a man you cannot replace him." "No," answered Big Foot, "we will keep the good guns." The two men returned to the group outside and reported what the chief had said.
Forsyth and Whitside counted off twenty men from the left flank of the Indian line and had Shangreau tell them to go to the village and bring back their rifles. While they were gone the group once more turned unruly, and the disorderly shuffling to and from the village resumed. At length the twenty men returned and laid down two broken carbines—"long used, no doubt, as toys by the children," observed Lieutenant Gresham, "but forming no part of the splendid Winchesters owned by the warriors." These were the only guns they had, the Indians declared. Rapidly losing his patience, Whitside turned to the colonel and said that their purpose could never be accomplished this way, that Big Foot should be brought out and commanded to have his men cooperate. Forsyth agreed that a more positive approach seemed necessary. At his order, the hospital steward, assisted by one of the Indians, carried Big Foot from the tent and laid him on the ground facing the center of the Indian line. He was stiff and weak and bleeding from the nose. The headmen of the band took station behind him and sat on the ground. Dr. Hoff stood nearby.
At the same time, again at Whitside's suggestion, Forsyth decided to put a stop to the traffic between the council and the village, for it was exciting the women. Lieutenant Nicholson, Whitside's adjutant, therefore summoned B and K Troops, a total of 110 men, from their station in the adjacent military camp. K Troop, under Captain Wallace and Lieutenant Mann, drew up about thirty paces behind the Indian line and parallel to it, facing north. B Troop, under Captain Varnum and Lieutenant Gresham, formed at right angles to K Troop and to the Indians, on the left flank of both, facing east. About thirty paces separated the front of this troop from the flank of the Indians; its left bent slightly and almost reached to Big Foot's tent. At the apex of the angle formed by the two troops, a gap of perhaps seventy-five yards intervened between Varnum's right and Wallace's left. As the Indians kept filtering through this exit, sentinels were strung across it at intervals of about twenty-five feet, and all traffic halted. There were now in the council 106 men, the other fourteen presumably being in the village. With Forsyth were Whitside, Shangreau, Philip Wells, Drs. Hoff and Glennan, Lieutenants McCormick, Nicholson, and Robinson, Father Craft, and the three reporters.
While B and K Troops were moving into these positions under the guidance of Lieutenant Nicholson, Forsyth was conferring with the reclining Big Foot. Philip Wells had taken Shangreau's place as interpreter. Forsyth had him tell Big Foot to direct his men to give up their guns. Big Foot replied that they had no guns. All weapons had been seized and burned by the soldiers at Cheyenne River. After Wells had translated, Forsyth said, according to Wells, "You tell Big Foot that he tells me that his Indians have no arms when yesterday at the time of surrender they were well armed. I am sure he is deceiving me." "They have no guns only such as you have found," answered the chief. "I gathered up all my guns at the Cheyenne River Agency and turned them in, and they were all burned up."
Big Foot declining to cooperate, Forsyth and Whitside concluded that there was nothing to do but detail soldiers to search the village. Wallace and Mann took fifteen men from their left flank and began at the east end of the village; Varnum broke fifteen off his right and began at the other end, at the base of Cemetery Hill. This widened still farther the interval at the apex of the angle. Whitside supervised the operation. John Shangreau went with Wallace as interpreter, Little Bat with Varnum. Lieutenant Nicholson and Dr. Ewing accompanied Varnum, while Lieutenant Preston (Taylor's second) and reporter Charles W. Allen accompanied Wallace and Mann.
"Everything found was so hidden that I almost had to dig for it," recalled Varnum. The women tried every stratagem possible to conceal the arms, many of them sitting on the ground and covering rifles with their voluminous skirts. Several had to be bodily removed. "The first rifle I found," testified Varnum, "was under a squaw who was moaning and who was so indisposed to the search that I had her displaced, and under her was a beautiful Winchester rifle." The searchers took everything that could be considered a weapon—knives, axes, hatchets, bows and arrows. Some arms were found in the wall pockets inside the tepees. Soon a sizable pile had accumulated. Captain Moylan brought his small reserve of A and I Troops down from the flank of Cemetery Hill and had the weapons carried up to the battery position. Even the wagons, which the women had packed for the trip to Pine Ridge, were unpacked and searched.
At the other end of the camp, Wallace's pile of weapons also grew. These his men carried to the council and threw in the tent occupied by the scouts. In a letter to his brother, written on his deathbed several days later, Lieutenant Mann described the scene:
We went through the tents searching for arms, and while this was going on, everyone seemed to be good natured, and we had no thought of trouble. The enlisted men were not allowed to go inside the tents and only took the arms as we [officers] handed them out. The squaws were sitting on bundles concealing guns and other arms. We lifted them as tenderly and treated them as nicely as possible. Had they been the most refined ladies in the land, they could not have been treated with more consideration. The squaws made no resistance, and when we took the arms they seemed to be satisfied. Wallace [a tall, gaunt, fatherly looking man] played with the children chucking them under the chin and being as pleasant with them all as could be. He had picked up a stone war club, which he carried with him.
While Varnum and Wallace searched the village, the men in the circle, nervous over their separation from the women, grew increasingly restless. Now and then one tried to slip through the barrier of soldiers, only to be turned back. Throughout the morning, the old medicine man, Yellow Bird, attired in the costume of the Ghost Dance, had been gyrating around the crowd of Indians, muttering incantations and occasionally stooping over, gathering a handful of dirt, and casting it into the air toward the soldiers. Suddenly he began to harangue the men, most, of whom had squatted on the ground. "Do not be afraid and let your hearts be strong to meet what is before you," he intoned, as Wells recalled it. "We are all well aware that there are lots of soldiers about us and they have lots of bullets, but I have received assurance that their bullets cannot penetrate us; the prairie is large and the bullets will not go towards you; they will not penetrate you." "How," the men, some of whom wore Ghost Shirts, answered in approval. Then Yellow Bird resumed his rhythmic dance around the group.
Wells turned to Whitside, who had come back to the council after starting the search details on their task. "That man is making mischief," he informed the major, and repeated what Yellow Bird had said. Whitside sent him to tell Forsyth. Wells and Forsyth walked over to Yellow Bird and commanded him to sit down. Big Foot's brother-in-law heard the order and said, "He will sit down when he gets around the circle." Yellow Bird soon squatted and lapsed into silence.
About 9:30 A.M. Wallace and Varnum completed the search of the village. They had turned up thirty-eight rifles. A few were Winchester repeaters, but most were old pieces of doubtful utility. The Winchesters so much in evidence at the surrender the day before remained concealed. There was now but one place they could be—under the blankets of the men themselves.
With Wells translating, Forsyth announced that each Indian would have to submit to inspection. He did not want to conduct a personal search, he said, but desired the Indians to come forward like men, remove their blankets, and deposit any concealed weapons on the ground. The older men responded with "How," and about twenty got up and moved toward the colonel, who stood just west of Big Foot's tent with Whitside, Varnum, Wallace, and a detail of about six cavalrymen. The young men made no move to comply, and Yellow Bird began to harangue them again.
One by one the old men pulled off their blankets, then were directed to one side. The search revealed no weapons. Next, Whitside and Varnum stood facing each other and began to pass the young men between them. The first three yielded two rifles, one a Winchester, and a quantity of ammunition. Varnum asked Whitside whether the belts should be taken as well as the ammunition. Whitside said to let the men keep the belts. Varnum's first sergeant held his hat while the captain emptied the cartridges into it. Someone went in search of a grain bag to use as a container for the shells.
The young men grew more excited as Yellow Bird continued his harangue. Philip Wells tried to get Big Foot's brother-in-law, a man of some influence, to calm them, but with no success. The tension communicated to the soldiers. Lieutenant Mann, commanding K Troop while Wallace helped with the disarming, observed the young men drifting toward the east edge of the council area. "I had a peculiar feeling come over me," he recalled, "some presentiment of trouble." "Be ready," he cautioned the men, "there is going to be trouble." At the same time, he ordered the troop, standing in four ranks with intervals of about two yards between files, to fall back about twenty-five feet. Executing this movement, the unit involuntarily closed to the left, away from the Indians, thus reducing the intervals and bunching the men together.
Meanwhile, an Indian named Black Coyote had been stalking around holding his rifle in both hands overhead. He was, Turning Hawk later explained, "a crazy man, a young man of very bad influence and in fact a nobody." Joseph Horn Cloud and Dewey Beard added that he was also deaf. Black Coyote shouted that this gun belonged to him; he had paid much money for it; and he would not give it to anyone unless he received pay in return. Two soldiers approached from behind and seized him. There was a brief struggle. Black Coyote brought the rifle down. Pointing to the east and upward at a 45-degree angle, it went off. As Turning Hawk innocently observed, "Of course the firing of a gun must have been the breaking of a military rule of some sort."
At the same instant, Yellow Bird gathered a handful of dirt and threw it into the air. Five or six young men on the east edge of the council area rose as one, threw aside their blankets, turned toward K Troop, and leveled their rifles. Lieutenant Robinson, mounted, was between them and K Troop. Swinging his horse to get out of the way, he shouted "Look out men, they are going to fire!" Captain Varnum, just searching the third young man to pass between him and Whitside, glanced toward the scene of the disturbance. "By God they have broken," he exclaimed. To Lieutenant Mann, the warriors seemed to hesitate an eternal moment. "I thought, 'the pity of it! What can they be thinking of?'"He drew his revolver and slipped through the ranks to the front. The volley crashed into Troop K. "Fire! Fire on them!" screamed Mann.
The explosion of a hundred carbines drowned the lieutenant's command, for by instinct both K and B Troops opened fire. Indians and soldiers stood face to face and shot it out. "The way those Sioux worked those Winchesters was beautiful," recalled an officer. And another, picturing the response of the troops, said, "I never in my life saw Springfields worked so industriously." Smoke and dust and the din of battle filled the square. Dewey Beard remembered chiefly the glint of brass buttons showing through the murk. The warriors emptied their rifles at Troop K, and every shot that missed a soldier plowed into the village, where women and children scrambled in terrified confusion to get out of the way.
A bullet grazed Lieutenant Gresham's nose; one knocked Varnum's pipe from his mouth; one hit Lieutenant Kenzie in the foot; several riddled Dr. Hoff's clothing; one smashed Lieutenant Garlington's elbow. Stone war club still in his hand, Captain Wallace rushed to his station behind K Troop. He had no sooner reached there than a bullet carried away the top of his head.
Just before the first fire the sun had begun to shine in Big Foot's eyes. Weakly, he rose to a sitting position. When the smoke cleared, White Lance remembered many years later, "I looked [and] I saw Big Foot lying down with blood on his forehead and his head to the right side." He was dead. Most of the headmen, including the elder Horn Cloud, who had scoffed at the Ghost Dance, had been cut down behind him.
"One man," an officer later related, "was hit early in the firing, but he continued to pump his Winchester; but growing weaker and weaker, his shots went higher and higher, until his last went straight up in the air."
With empty rifle magazines, the warriors dissolved into small parties and dashed around the square trying to break through the blue lines. There were individual, hand-to-hand fights.
Dewey Beard rushed a soldier and tried to grab his carbine. The two struggled for a moment. With his right hand, Dewey sank his knife into his opponent's side. The carbine dropped. The soldier seized Dewey around the throat and tried to strangle him. Again Dewey plunged the knife into the man's side. He went down, but tried to rise. Dewey straddled him and, while the soldier screamed, stabbed him again and again in the kidney until he died.
A warrior sprang at Philip Wells with a long cheese knife ground to a fine point. Wells dropped to one knee and threw up his rifle to ward off the blow. The Indian's wrist struck the rifle but the knife sliced deep into Wells's nose, which dropped over his mouth, hanging by two shreds of skin. The Indian drew back for another thrust. Wells, now on his back, parried it with his rifle. Again the Indian drew back. Wells smashed him behind the ear with the rifle muzzle. The stunned assailant recoiled, and Wells, jumping to his feet, shot him in the side. He fell. A corporal ran over and shot him again, in the chest. Bleeding profusely, Wells ran for the shelter of trader Jim Asay's wagon. He slipped on the grass and fell. Another Indian jumped on his back with a knife, but only cut his coat. Wells got free and continued to fight. He tried to pull his nose off, but it would not come loose.
Dr. Ewing had crawled in the back of Asay's wagon. As Wells ran toward it, bullets grazed the mules and they stampeded, carrying Ewing around the cavalry tents on the north to the base of Cemetery Hill.
A warrior ran past Father Craft, but paused long enough to drive a knife between his shoulder blades and into one of his lungs. "The poor fellow did not see that he was stabbing a black robe," Craft later explained. The wound was a bad one, but the priest continued to move among the soldiers, giving first aid and administering last rites to the dying.
Reporter William F. Kelley saw an Indian charging directly at him. He raised his revolver and fired all six shots into the oncoming figure. Then he picked up a carbine and cartridge belt dropped by a soldier and continued to fire at the warriors. He was later credited with killing at least three.
The savage contest at close quarters lasted no more than five minutes before the bulk of the warriors succeeded in breaching the military lines. Some ran to the east, across the agency road toward G Troop. Most, however, broke through and around K Troop and made for the village. Some turned to shoot back at the soldiers, who returned the fire. Again bullets riddled the tepees—and the women and children. Behind, in the council square, more than twenty Miniconjous littered the ground together with more than thirty dead and wounded soldiers of B and K Troops.
Horrified, the troops ringing the battleground had watched the furious melee in the council square. They could not fire because the Indians were mixed up with their comrades. Lieutenant Robinson, who had been caught in the square on horseback, galloped around the rear of B Troop and up Cemetery Hill. Dismounting behind the crest, he scrambled to the top. The artillerymen were standing at their guns, lanyards in hand, waiting for the order to fire. Captain Capron—"a grim old fellow, with a red-lined cape overcoat, and nerve enough for a hundredton gun"—noticed that one of the gunners was agitated. Fearing that he would jerk the lanyard before the cavalrymen below had separated from the warriors, he ordered the friction primer removed from the gun. Then the Indians broke from the square, B and K Troops fell back among the tents of their own camp, and Colonel Forsyth made his way to the battery position. At once the four guns opened up on all groups of Indians that could be seen shooting at soldiers. Firing up to fifty explosive shells a minute, they did their work with deadly effect.
The first clear target that presented itself to Capron's eager gunners seems to have been the warriors who bolted to the east of the council square. Joined by some women and children from the east end of the village, they turned north on the agency road toward the store. The artillery hurled shells into them. Many people scattered from the road into the field southeast of the store and came under the carbines of Edgerly's Troop G, which had dismounted. Those who escaped found safety beneath the banks of Wounded Knee Creek to the north.
At the first fire the Indian village boiled with panic-stricken women and children. Those in the northwest end piled into wagons, already loaded and harnessed, and fled up the road to the northwest in the wake of the stampeding pony herd. Troop E occupied the low hill on the right flank of the battery. Lieutenants Sickel and Rice promptly dismounted the unit and deployed it to cover the road. Seeing that the approaching horde consisted of women and children, both officers shouted orders not to fire at the Indians, but to knock down the ponies. The men opened on the herd. An old woman on horseback fired at the dismounted line. "There is a buck," shouted one of the troopers, and aimed his carbine at her. "No, it is a squaw," retorted Lieutenant Rice, "don't shoot on her." "Well by God, Lieutenant, she is shooting at us," growled the soldier, but he turned his weapon back on the ponies. The fleeing women and children escaped unhurt up the road.
By the time the warriors broke from the square toward the village, the bulk of the women and children had begun to race for the shelter of the ravine on the south edge of the Indian camp. Captain Nowlan commanded the line of sentinels on the opposite side of the ravine. "Don't fire, let them go, they are squaws," he ordered, and the men up and down the line took up the cry. The women and children poured into the ravine. Close on their heels came the rush of warriors who had freed themselves from the council square. "Here come the bucks," yelled Nowlan, "give it to them." The sentinels opened fire, and the charging warriors responded.
The three lines that confronted the Indians on the south side of the ravine—sentinels, Oglala scouts, and C and D Troops— found themselves in a dangerous position. Bullets from Troops B and K, firing into the rear of the warriors, reached into the soldiers and scouts beyond, and Hotchkiss shells began to burst uncomfortably close. The sentinels fell back on the scouts, who in turn scattered both to the east and the west, as well as to the shelter of the ravine in their front. When a shell exploded directly in front of C and D Troops, they, too, began to shift. C Troop, on the right flank, broke into its two platoons. Lieutenant Donaldson and the platoon on the right galloped around a wire fence in the rear and dismounted. A detail led the horses into a shallow ravine to the south, and Donaldson spread out a skirmish line. Captain Jackson and the other platoon fell back and dismounted on the west side of the wire fence. D Troop, at Captain Godfrey's command, withdrew behind the ridge on his left, then formed a dismounted skirmish line on top of the ridge, facing the ravine.
The warriors kept coming, down into the ravine and up the south bank. Now mixed with women and children, they burst onto the flat beyond, trying to reach the agency road. The carbines of Donaldson, Jackson, and Godfrey opened on them. "I gave the command, 'Commence Firing!'"wrote Godfrey six years later. "They fired rapidly but it seemed to me only a few seconds till there was not a living thing before us; warriors, squaws, children, ponies, dogs—for they were all mixed together —went down before that unaimed fire, and I don't think anything got nearer than a hundred yards. I believe over thirty bodies were found on our front."
A half-dozen women ran at Donaldson's platoon from one side, making signs begging not to be killed. Donaldson motioned them to the sheltered position of the horses, then went down himself and told the corporal in charge of the horse-holders to take care of the women. Returning to the line, he found that the Indians were retreating to the safety of the ravine. He went into the field in front of his line. Dead and wounded Indians littered the ground. A rifle protruded from one blanket-shrouded figure. He lifted the blanket. A man and woman lay side by side, both dead.
In the ravine the Indians ran in both directions. Some of those who went up the ravine paused to fire into the rear of D Troop, on the ridge to the south. Godfrey sent Lieutenant Tompkins and twelve men to stop this fire. The squad charged down the slope and poured a volley into the ravine, knocking over three warriors and flushing the rest. "A party of squaws and children ran up the ravine not over 100 yards from my men," testified the lieutenant. "I immediately gave the order don't fire on the women and children.... Behind them, 25 or 30 yards from them, came two bucks, stripped and painted, and my men killed these." Tompkins' squad continued to fire into the ravine.
Most of the action now focused on the fringes of the battlefield, with the troops hunting down the fleeing Indians. But there was also sporadic fighting in the council square and in the village itself. Not all the Indians had left the village. An occasional shot came from the tepees. To stop this, the battery raked the Miniconjou camp from one end to the other. Flying shrapnel shredded the lodges and sought out every living thing. One woman, Blue Whirlwind, received fourteen wounds but lived. Her two little boys were wounded by her side. Another woman, maddened by wounds, crawled from the edge of the village. With a butcher knife between her teeth, she made her painful way over a distance of ten yards to where a soldier lay on his back, wounded. She raised the knife over him and, as he screamed, plunged it into his breast. Another soldier, in the square, saw the act and sent a bullet into her head. She dropped next to her victim.
The artillery silenced the fire from the village. Later, the troops found Sgt. Maj. Richard Corwin, Quartermaster Sergeant Charles Campbell, and Hospital Steward Oscar Pollack lying with the bodies of Indians amid the wreckage. Campbell was still alive, but Corwin and Pollack were dead. Whether they were shot by Indians or soldiers is not known. Whitside later stated that they had gone to the village without authority.
In the square, Yellow Bird had taken refuge in the Sibley tent belonging to the scouts. Slitting a hole in the canvas wall, he shot down several soldiers before someone noticed the source of fire. A private of K Troop said, "I will get the ——— out of there," and ran toward the tent. "Come back," shouted Lieutenant Mann. The soldier ignored the command and with his knife slashed open the tent. Yellow Bird fired into his attacker's stomach, and he recoiled. "My God," he exclaimed, "he has shot me. I am killed. I am killed." Turning, he staggered toward his lieutenant but fell forward, dead. Cavalrymen riddled the tent, and a Hotchkiss gun pitched two shells directly into it. Some soldiers stacked bales of hay around it and ignited them. The tent burned to the ground, revealing the shattered, charred body of the man who bore the largest responsibility for the Wounded Knee tragedy.
The fighting now centered on the ravine. Of all the images of the battle that the Indian survivors retained to their last days, the experiences in this inferno remained most vivid. Dewey Beard's ordeal, if not typical, was in after years related with greatest clarity.
After stabbing the soldier in the council square, Dewey bolted through K Troop and the village to the ravine. The sentinels on the south side fired at him, and a bullet struck him in the arm, knocking him down. Another soldier pointed his carbine, but the hammer snapped on an empty chamber. Dewey tried to shoot back, but his rifle, too, was empty. He got up and ran down the slope into the ravine. Another bullet hit him "in the lap." He sat down, reloaded, and began to fire at the blue figures dimly seen through the smoke on the opposite lip of the ravine. His gun jammed, a shell stuck in the chamber. He struggled to his feet and staggered up the ravine. Soldiers stood on both sides, firing down. (They were sentinels of A and I Troops who had been stationed on the west side of the village, and the detail from Troop D under Tompkins positioned by Godfrey.)
From an old man, Dewey got a cavalry Springfield. With two other warriors, he climbed the south bank and charged some soldiers. His companions dropped. Dewey raced back to the ravine. He came face to face with one of Taylor's scouts, who had sought shelter from the bullets lacing the flats above. Both men fired. Both missed, but Dewey, weak from his wounds, fell on his back. The scout ran away.
For a few moments Dewey watched the women and children surging up the ravine. Many fell as bullets and shrapnel struck them. Hugging the banks, mothers clawed at the sides of the ravine, digging shelter in which to place their infants. Crawling up the ravine, Dewey overtook his mother, badly wounded, holding a soldier's pistol in her hand. "My son," she said, "pass by me, I am going to fall down now." Another bullet hit her and she slumped to the ground, dead.
Now out of cartridges for the Springfield, Dewey obtained a fully loaded Winchester from another old man and continued his painful journey up the ravine, looking for his wife. He found his brother William sitting against the bank. Blood ran from a hole in his chest, but he was still alive. White Lance, Dewey's closest friend, slid down the bank. He was wounded, too. Together the three men went farther up the ravine. At a point where it turned sharply, forming a pocket, they and several other warriors crawled to the brow and began to fire at E Troop and the battery.
They drew a deluge of shot and shell. Bullets, shrapnel, smoke, and dust filled the ravine until the atmosphere was both deadly and suffocating. The bursting artillery rounds churned up the earth and caved in the banks. Dewey saw a Hotchkiss shell punch a six-inch hole in the middle of a man's stomach. Up and down the ravine the people sang death songs. A bullet smacked the earth directly in front of Dewey's face and threw dirt into his eyes, blinding him. He slid down the bank.
The troops remembered well the heroic stand of Dewey and his companions at the pocket. To get better aim on the pocket, Cpl. Paul H. Weinert and several men moved a Hotchkiss gun from Cemetery Hill to the lower hill on the west, where E Troop was formed.
All of the Indians opened fire on us [Weinert wrote]. One of my men went for ammunition and didn't come back.... My captain called to me to come back, but I kept moving nearer the Indians, and kept shooting. Lieutenant Hawthorne came toward me and was calling, when suddenly I heard him say: "Oh, my God!" Looking around, I saw him lying on his side, and then I knew he had been hit. Hartzog ran to him and carried him back behind the hill. I said: "By God! I'll make 'em pay for that," and ran the gun fairly into the opening of the ravine and tried to make every shot count. The Hotchkiss was a single-shot affair and had to be pulled off with a lanyard. They kept yelling at me to come back, and I kept yelling for a cool gun—there were three more on the hill not in use. Bullets were coming like hail from the Indians' Winchesters. The wheels of my gun were bored full of holes and our clothing was marked in several places. Once a cartridge was knocked out of my hand just as I was about to put it in the gun, and it's a wonder the cartridge didn't explode. I kept going in farther, and pretty soon everything was quiet at the other end of the line. Then the other guns came down. I expected a court-martial, but what was my surprise when gruff old Allyn Capron, my captain, came up to me and grasped me by the shoulders and said to the officers and men: "That's the kind of men I have in my battery."
At Forsyth's order, Lieutenant Rice took his platoon of Troop E to the northwest and started down the ravine, clearing everything in his front. The pressure of this movement, together with the close-range fire of Weinert's cannon, drove the warriors from the pocket.
Dewey had started up the ravine, still looking for his wife, but had to climb out and flee to the south and west when he ran into Rice's skirmishers moving east. (Dewey's wife, Wears Eagle, was in fact dead. When she was later found, shot in the chest, her 25-day-old infant, Wet Feet, was still nursing at the mother's breast. According to Dewey, the child swallowed so much blood that she died three months later. Besides his wife and baby, Dewey lost his mother and father and two brothers, William and Sherman.)
Lower down the ravine, Philip Wells, his nose still dangling, had walked to the edge of the ravine and cried out, in the Sioux tongue, "All of you that are still alive get up and come on over, you will not be molested or shot at any more." One old man painfully raised up and braced himself with his hands in a sitting position. Paddy Starr, who had come out with Taylor's scouts, watched in horror as, just then, the first of Rice's platoon, relentlessly sweeping the ravine from above, came into view. The troopers had not heard or understood Wells and, seeing the old man move, they instantly cut him down with their carbines. When they became aware of the situation, however, they called off the operation. One by one, wounded people emerged from the ravine and, guided by soldiers, made their way to the hospital area north of the cavalry camp.
Wells went to the council square, where more than twenty Miniconjous lay scattered around. "These white people came to save you," he called out in the Sioux language, "and you have brought death on yourselves. Still the white people are merciful to save the wounded enemy when he is harmless, so if some of you are alive raise your heads. I am a man of your own blood who is talking to you." About a dozen prostrate figures raised their heads. One, named Frog, called Wells to his side. Pointing to the body of Yellow Bird, he asked, "Who is that man lying burned there?" Wells told him.
He raised himself a little higher [related Wells], raised his closed fist, pointing it towards the dead Indian, shot out his fingers, which is amongst Indians a deadly insult, meaning I could kill you and not be satisfied doing it, am sorry I could do no more to you, and then used words tremblingly which I could not all catch, but he said this which I did hear, speaking as though to the dead man: "If I could be taken to you I would stab you," then turning to me said, "he is our murderer; only for him inciting our young men we would have all been alive and happy."
Shortly after the close of the heavy fighting at the lower end of the ravine, Major Whitside rode over to confer with Captains Jackson and Godfrey. Crossing the ravine, he met a soldier holding an infant lifted from the arms of a dead mother. The trooper asked what he should do with it. Whitside pointed to a group of women, guarded by a detail of cavalrymen, and told the man to turn over the baby to these women. Continuing, he found Jackson and Godfrey with their troops south of the ravine. Jackson he ordered to go after the pony herd, which was grazing along the road about a mile west of Cemetery Hill. Godfrey he ordered to follow the ravine to its head, some two miles to the west, in search of any Miniconjous who had got that far from the battlefield.
Leaving the balance of Troop D with Lieutenant Tompkins on the edge of the ravine, Godfrey took fourteen men and followed up the ravine to the crest of the divide, then descended to the wooded valley of a small creek on the other side. Surmounting a high hill west of this creek, he scanned the countryside without detecting any sign of the enemy. Returning to the valley, he had led his detachment a short distance down it when the advance guard shouted back that Indians were running into a clump of dense brush on the bank of the stream in their front.
Godfrey at once dismounted and pushed a skirmish line cautiously forward. "How, Cola; squaw, papoose, Cola, How, Cola," he shouted. There was no response. The men moved closer. "How, Cola; squaw, papoose," repeated the captain. Still there was no sound or movement. "Ready, Fire," commanded Godfrey, and a single volley crashed into the brush. Someone screamed. "Cease firing," Godfrey shouted. He ran to the brush and parted it. A woman and two children lay thrashing in their death agonies, while a fourth figure, which Godfrey took for a man, lay still on his face.
As the men turned to leave, Blacksmith Carey flicked aside the coat tails of the prostrate form and exclaimed, "This man ain't dead." Instantly he sent a bullet into the back of his head. Turning the body on it back, Godfrey saw a boy of perhaps fourteen or fifteen, although later witnesses contended that he was no more than eight or ten. The detachment headed back toward the battlefield.
Meanwhile, Captain Jackson and thirty-four men of C Troop had ridden hard after the herd, but passed it by when they spied a movement at the head of the ravine about a mile in advance. It was an Indian sliding into the ravine. There were in fact twenty-five Miniconjous concealed here, eight of whom were men. They had burrowed a shelter under an overhang of the bank. When Jackson galloped up, all he could see amid the brush on the edge were the muzzles of rifles pointing at him. C Troop dismounted and both sides began shooting. Jackson sent Lieutenant Donaldson and a detail down the ravine to seal off the only covered escape path and began to close in.
He soon had reinforcements. Captain Edgerly received orders from Forsyth to round up the Indians who had fled to the west. Lieutenant Taylor and a few of the Oglala scouts went with G Troop. Some scouts and soldiers were dropped off to corral and guard the Indian ponies. Arriving at the head of the ravine, Edgerly reported to Jackson and was instructed to post his troop on the opposite side of the besieged Indians.
After a brief exchange of fire, one of the scouts told Taylor that there were women and children in the ravine, some of them his own relatives. He thought they could be persuaded to come out and give up. Jackson gave the "cease fire," and the skirmish lines pulled back a bit to afford the scouts a chance to negotiate. Three or four went near the Miniconjous and shouted that if they surrendered they would not be harmed. "It took half an hour talking with them," said Jackson, "and I had to withdraw my men before they would come out."
The handful of beleaguered Indians were in no condition to withstand a siege, and at last they began to file from their refuge. Soldiers went in and carried out the wounded—four men, three women, and a child. The aid men dressed the wounds of these people, and Captain Edgerly himself bandaged the injured child. The men gathered fifteen to eighteen rifles from the ravine.
A messenger rode back to the battlefield to summon an ambulance. Edgerly and Taylor left, too, picking up the pony herd en route. Jackson remained with his prisoners to wait for the ambulance.
As he waited, Captain Godfrey and the fourteen men of Troop D, returning to the battlefield after scouting the small creek west of the divide, rode up the ridge from the west and joined Troop C. Jackson was just organizing a detail to sweep down the ravine toward the main battlefield when six mounted Indians rode up from the west. One wore the badge of an agency policeman. At the same time, Jackson noticed a growing party of mounted Indians forming on a hill to the northwest. The six men shook hands with Jackson, Godfrey, and Donaldson, then turned and rode back toward the other Indians. After riding about seventy-five yards, they wheeled and, while the policeman gesticulated in an apparent attempt to stop the act, fired back at the soldiers. One of Godfrey's men fell, wounded.
The Indians on the hill, now numbering about 150, deployed rapidly and charged the troops from three directions. At Jackson's order, the cavalrymen abandoned the prisoners and scattered down the east slope of the divide. They rallied some 400 yards below and received the charging Sioux with a well-directed volley that killed one, Flying Horse, and wounded two others. The warriors turned about, withdrew to the top of the ridge, gathered up the Miniconjous, and rode off to the west. Jackson had quickly recognized his attackers for what they were —Oglalas and Brulés from the agency who had heard the sounds of battle and rushed to the aid of their Miniconjou kinsmen. The courier he sent to Forsyth for help took this word. Soon Captain Edgerly with Troops E and G came galloping to the rescue, only to find that the enemy had retired.
Without their prisoners—indeed, without the C Troop guidon —Jackson and his men returned to the battlefield. They found the rest of the command, alarmed at the report of agency Indians joining the fracas, forming a defense perimeter on Cemetery Hill. A wagon train had arrived from the agency with provisions, and the wagons and their contents were being hastily arranged as barricades around the artillery on the hill. It soon became apparent, however, that the fresh force of warriors had no intention of challenging the soldiers. Everyone relaxed and set about the task of cleaning up the battlefield. It was now close to noon.
During the mopping-up operations, Drs. Hoff, Glennan, and Ewing labored in the field hospital improvised on the site of the Second Squadron's bivouac. The two privates of the Hospital Corps, and later the troop aid men, assisted. Civilian teamsters drove the two ambulances. Although one had abandoned the field in panic, he returned after regaining control of himself. The ambulances moved around the field, collecting wounded soldiers and Indians and taking them to the hospital.
The Indian dead were left temporarily where they lay, together with a large number of wounded. Some of the latter had escaped to hiding places away from the immediate battlefield, and others were in parts of the ravine where resistance was never entirely eliminated because Forsyth did not want to risk further bloodshed.
Exactly how many Indians died in the holocaust is not known. The burial detail later interred 146 on the battlefield: 84 men and boys, 44 women, and 18 children. Fifty-one wounded were ultimately admitted to the hospital at Pine Ridge. Of these, at least 7 later died. Thus the known dead totals 153, the wounded 44. To this figure must be added the unknown number gathered up on the night of the 29th by agency Indians, and still others who got away from the field under their own power, either to live or die afterward. It is entirely likely that another 20 to 30 may be counted in this category. Few indeed of Big Foot's people escaped death or injury.
White casualties numbered in killed 1 officer (Wallace), 6 noncommissioned officers, and 18 privates, a total of 25. Wounded were 4 officers (including the visiting infantryman, Kenzie), 11 noncommissioned officers, 22 privates, and 2 civilians (Wells and Craft), a total of 39.
Forsyth rushed word of the conflict to General Brooke, who already knew from the sound of cannon fire that a fight had taken place. Lieutenant Preston, accompanied by Pvt. Nathan Fellman and an Oglala scout, carried Forsyth's message to Pine Ridge in the short space of an hour. Now the colonel gave orders to prepare for the move to the agency.
The two badly wounded officers, Lieutenants Garlington and Hawthorne, occupied one of the spring ambulances, Father Craft and a sergeant the other. The wounded, both white and red, were loaded in the freight wagons that had arrived with supplies late in the morning. Sacks of grain overlaid with loose straw served as mattresses, but the jolting of the springless vehicles made the journey to Pine Ridge a painful ordeal. Late in the afternoon, the Seventh Cavalry and its cargo of wounded moved out on the agency road, leaving the battlefield strewn with the corpses of Big Foot and his hapless people.
A lone white man preceded the Seventh. Valentine T. McGillycuddy had returned to the agency and, hearing the sound of firing, had ridden out to the battlefield. The fight was over by the time he got there, and he started back toward the agency. He met a wagon loaded with Indians. "Don't you know me, Wasicu Wakan?" one asked. McGillycuddy thought. "When you were our agent," the man continued, "you made an agreement with us that if we would give you fifty of our young men to act as police the soldiers would not come to our agency." Exposing a bloody, bullet-punctured chest, he said, "Look at that, Father. I was one of your police. How about the promise?" "A promise, Thunder Cloud, is of no value," replied McGillycuddy, "when one ceases to have the power to fill it."
The three correspondents who had accompanied Forsyth rather than remain with the others at the agency had made a wise decision indeed. Before their eyes unfolded the biggest news story yielded by the Indian frontier since the Custer disaster fourteen years earlier. After interviewing survivors, the newsmen repaired to Louis Mosseau's store and wrote up their accounts. By 5:00 P.M. they had finished, and Richard C. Stirk, who had been hired as a courier, galloped out of the valley bearing the dispatches. Three hours later he was in the telegraph office at Rushville. The correspondents at Pine Ridge had set up a schedule by which they took turns sending the first dispatch of the day out of Rushville. Luck favored Kelley of the _Nebraska State Journal_ , for December 29 was his day to enjoy top priority. In Lincoln, Kelley's editor put his story on the wires of the United Press, and next morning people everywhere read of the bloody encounter between Big Foot's band and the Seventh Cavalry.
Starved for news of a "Sioux War" that in more than a month had failed to produce any excitement, the nation's press gave full play to Wounded Knee. Few journals exhibited moderation in their editorial judgments. One segment of the press portrayed the battle as a triumph of valorous soldiers over treacherous Indians plotting another Custer affair. The other vented outrage on a regiment that, thirsting for revenge since the Little Bighorn, had wantonly slaughtered gentle Indians and had found particular glee in butchering helpless women and children. The press thus introduced extremes of interpretation that have persisted in the history of Wounded Knee to this day. Few treatments of the event published since 1890 have failed to reflect one or the other extreme.
Yet, as so often happens, the truth lies somewhere between the extremes. Big Foot's people wanted peace. Fear and suspicion led them to carry passive resistance to disarmament to the point where both sides were so nervous that any incident or misunderstanding could spark a conflict. Even so, they would ultimately have given up their guns had not a few unthinking young men, incited by a fanatical medicine man, lost control of themselves and created an incident. Sucked into the cauldron of battle, their families exposed to the murderous fire of the troops, there was nothing to do but fight.
Once fired upon, the soldiers fought back with a fury inspired by what they deemed Indian treachery. They did not deliberately kill women and children, although in a few instances more caution might have been exercised. Women and children were mixed with men, and smoke and dust obscured the battlefield. It was inevitable that, in the excitement of combat, the troops would shoot noncombatants. Indeed, as we have seen, the warriors themselves upon one occasion poured a destructive fire into their own families.
The vast majority of both Indians and soldiers were—within their differing cultural frameworks—decent, ordinary people. They suddenly found themselves thrust into battle, and they reacted with behavioral extremes that battle from time immemorial has induced in ordinary people.
It is time that Wounded Knee be viewed for what it was—a regrettable, tragic accident of war that neither side intended, and that called forth behavior for which some individuals on both sides, in unemotional retrospect, may be judged culpable, but for which neither side as a whole may be properly condemned.
## _13. DREXEL MISSION_
IT HAD BEEN an eventful day at Pine Ridge Agency, too. At midmorning, the reports of Capron's guns echoed faintly over the hills to the east, announcing to whites and Indians alike that a fight was in progress.
The great camps of Sioux ringing the agency burst into frantic activity, and none more so than that of Two Strike, whose Brulés had so recently numbered themselves among the followers of Short Bull and Kicking Bear. About 150 warriors painted themselves and rushed to the sound of the guns. It was this force that collided with Captains Jackson and Godfrey on the ridge west of the Wounded Knee battleground.
At the agency, the remaining Brulés struck their tepees and prepared for flight. Some of the white women were assembled around a Christmas tree in the chapel sacking candy for the festivities of the Christmas season. Elaine Goodale watched from the window of the chapel. "Their white camps melted away like snow-banks in April," she wrote. "The brown hills were instantly alive with galloping horsemen and a long line of loaded wagons disappeared in the distance."
General Brooke, Agent Royer, and their assistants tried hard to calm the excited Indians, but with little success. Their efforts became pointless, at least for the Two Strike people, when the Brulé war party returned from Wounded Knee about 1:00 P.M. with word of the slaughter of Big Foot's band. Angered also by the death of Flying Horse before the carbines of Jackson and Godfrey, the Brulés were bent on trouble. They swarmed menacingly over the ridge southwest of the agency, beyond Red Cloud's house. Finally, a man named Turning Bear decided to cross the creek and set fire to the agency barn. The police turned out to stop him. He fired two shots. The police replied with a fusillade that churned up the soil around the lone attacker and sent him running back up the ridge. With Dr. Eastman, General Brooke raced to the scene of the disturbance. "Stop, stop!" shouted the general. "Doctor, tell them they must not fire until ordered!" Eastman translated, and the police stopped firing.
The Brulés now turned a long-range fire on the agency. Most of the bullets fell harmlessly short of the mark, but two soldiers on the line southwest of the military camp were wounded. Lt. A. W. Corliss, commanding here, went to Brooke and asked permission to return the fire with his Hotchkiss gun. Brooke refused. He still hoped to coax the stampeding Sioux into returning quietly to their campsites. To throw artillery shells in the direction of Red Cloud's house would hardly improve the chance of success. Brooke's belief, as he wired Miles shortly after the first exchange of gunfire, was that "the Indians belonging to this Agency are excited but not hostile in their attitude."
The civilians at the agency did not share the general's optimism. The firing convinced them that hundreds of maddened Sioux were about to attack the agency. "Every married employee was seeking a place of safety for his family," said Dr. Eastman. "My office was full of refugees." He made arrangements with one to secure a horse and get Elaine Goodale through to the railroad and safety. On Christmas Day she had consented to marry him.
But Elaine Goodale refused to go. She had her hands full at the chapel and the mission, now "swamped by a crowd of sobbing, terrified women and children—church members, for the most part of mixed descent. The two Presbyterian missionary women left their more exposed cottage on the brow of the hill and joined us in the rectory, one of them carrying her pet canary in his cage. The solid outside shutters were slammed to, the oil lamps lit, and an effort made to calm the excitement with the help of hot coffee and sandwiches."
The fears turned out to be groundless. Except for the war party that went to Wounded Knee, the Two Strike Brulés had fled northwest, down White Clay Creek. Brooke managed to quiet a large share of the Oglalas, but many went with the Brulés, including the Oglala leaders Little Wound, Big Road, and No Water. About dusk the war party lifted the "siege" and headed north to join their families. From his nearby cabin they abducted old Red Cloud. They "forced me to go with them," he later explained to Thomas A. Bland. "I being in danger of my life between two fires I had to go with them and follow my family. Some would shoot their guns around me and make me go faster." To such depths of humiliation had the mighty chief of the Oglalas fallen in his old age.
About fifteen miles northwest of the agency, in the valley of White Clay Creek, the refugees from Pine Ridge met Short Bull and Kicking Bear journeying with their followers toward the agency. The news of Wounded Knee destroyed their already hesitant resolve to give up, and the combined group, numbering about 4,000 people with 800 to 1,000 warriors, went into camp on White Clay Creek near No Water's abandoned village. Throughout the night survivors of Wounded Knee, many badly shot up, drifted into the camp. There was much crying, mourning, singing of death songs and ghost songs, and even some Ghost Dancing. The leaders went into council. In Red Cloud's words, they "made a law, that no one should go back to the agency. All rather die together. I tried my best for them to let me go back, but they would not let me go, and said if I went they would kill me."
The Seventh Cavalry rode into the agency at 9:30 P.M. Forsyth turned aside to report to General Brooke while the men headed for camp, cared for their horses, and took to their blankets. For most, however, it was a fitful sleep. No one knew what the stampeding refugees would do. "Just when they would appear again," said Lieutenant McCormick, "and whether as an attacking force or as ration receivers, was a question."
The wounded were taken directly to the field hospital that Brooke's medical director, Lt. Col. Dallas Bache, had laid out. Philip Wells got his nose taped back into position, and it later mended so well that only close inspection could reveal the disaster that had befallen it. Father Craft recovered, too. "The wound he received," wrote James Cook, "would undoubtedly have killed some men. He was laid up for a short time, and if he stopped smoking cigarettes for two days because of that little cut, I have no record of it."
Colonel Bache's military hospital accommodated only sixty patients, and Reverend Charles Cook converted the Episcopal mission chapel into a hospital for wounded Indians. He had the pews torn out and the floor carpeted with straw and quilts.
There we laid the poor creatures side by side in rows [wrote Dr. Eastman], and the night was devoted to caring for them as best we could. Many were frightfully torn by pieces of shells, and the suffering was terrible. General Brooke placed me in charge and I had to do nearly all the work, for although the army surgeons were more than ready to help as soon as their own men had been cared for, the tortured Indians would scarcely allow a man in uniform to touch them. Mrs. Cook, Miss Goodale, and several of Mr. Cook's Indian helpers acted as volunteer nurses. In spite of all our efforts we lost the greater part of them, but a few recovered, including several children who had lost all their relatives and who were adopted into kind Christian families.
There were thirty-eight wounded Indians in the church hospital and another thirteen in the military hospital. Four were men, the rest women and children. Those in the field hospital also cowered at the sight of blue uniforms. With professional detachment the Surgeon General of the Army later reported that "The wounds of the Indians were mostly severe and difficult to heal, as all capital operations were refused, notwithstanding repeated explanation and urging through missionaries, interpreters and friends. The simplest handling was at first resisted or met with suspicion. In cases of extensive injury to large bones or joints septic fever came sooner or later, and finally death."
The pathos of the spectacle in the church deeply touched Episcopal Bishop W. H. Hare, who dropped in a few days after the battle:
On entering the church, two sights presented themselves. On the church floor, instead of the pews on either side of the aisle, two rows of bleeding, groaning, wounded men, women, and children; tending them two military surgeons and a native physician assisted by the missionary and his helpers, assiduity and tenderness marking all. Above, the Christmas green was still hanging. To one of my moods they seemed a mockery to all my faith and hope; to another they seemed an inspiration still singing, though in a minor key, "Peace, good will to men."
As the Seventh Cavalry and its wounded neared the agency on the night of December 29, Maj. Guy V. Henry's squadron of the Ninth Cavalry, fifty miles to the north, was preparing to turn in for the night. During the day, his troopers had ridden a punishing fifty miles, scouting the tableland recently vacated by Short Bull and Kicking Bear. At 7:00 P.M. they had returned to their base camp on White River opposite the mouth of Wounded Knee Creek. Two hours later a pair of Indian scouts rode in from Pine Ridge with news of the Wounded Knee battle and orders from General Brooke to hasten to the defense of the threatened agency.
The soldiers promptly struck camp, loaded the wagons, and set out on a grueling, all-night journey. They huddled in buffalo overcoats and muskrat caps as gusts of wind whipped a light snow down the valley of Wounded Knee Creek. Straining to reach the agency before daybreak, Henry pushed his exhausted men and horses to the limit, and finally, leaving Capt. John S. Loud's Troop I as escort, cut loose from the wagon train. Shortly before dawn, Henry led the remaining three troops into the agency and, just as reveille was sounding in the camp of the Seventh Cavalry, they wearily rolled up in their blankets.
Almost immediately one of Captain Loud's men galloped in on a lathered horse to report that the wagon train had been attacked by Indians two miles east of the agency. Lieutenant Preston quickly mounted the Oglala scouts and, followed shortly by the Seventh Cavalry, charged to the rescue. They found the train corralled for defense. On a nearby hill about half a dozen warriors scattered in retreat before the approaching relief column. Loud had lost a corporal in the brief skirmish, but suffered no other casualties. Under the formidable escort of a regiment of cavalry, the train completed its journey to Pine Ridge in safety.
The warriors who attacked the wagon train, about forty to fifty in number, had been sent out by the chiefs from the rendezvous camp fifteen miles north of the agency. The mission of this party was to observe the strength and activities of General Brooke's soldiers but not, the chiefs emphasized, to bring on a fight. It was too much to expect of hot-headed young men incensed by the events of the day before, and, chancing upon the wagon train, they could not resist striking a blow. Frightened off by the approach of the Seventh Cavalry, the warriors rode northward toward Father Jutz' Holy Rosary Catholic Mission —the Drexel Mission—in White Clay Valley four miles below the agency. About twenty persons who lived in the neighborhood, mostly mixed-bloods, had gathered there, for the Indians had promised not to harm anyone or anything within the mission enclosure. The Sisters of St. Francis, assisted by Philip Wells's wife, a schoolteacher, stood at the gate handing out meat and coffee to passing refugees making their way from the agency to the rendezvous.
When the warriors reached the vicinity of the mission, they were still in ugly humor. A short distance above the mission, they spitefully set fire to a small log cabin that Mrs. Wells used as a schoolhouse, then continued down the valley.
The dense column of smoke rising from the burning cabin alerted the troops at the agency. Fearing that Drexel Mission had been fired, General Brooke turned out the Seventh Cavalry and told Henry to be ready to move also if necessary. Behind Forsyth, the two squadrons of cavalry and a platoon of Capron's Hotchkiss guns set out at a gallop, followed closely by Lieutenant Preston and ten scouts, including Philip Wells, John and Louis Shangreau, Little Bat, and Joe Merrivale. They quickly discovered the true source of the smoke, then continued to the mission. While Forsyth and Father Jutz talked at the gate to the mission enclosure, the hungry soldiers, who had not had time for breakfast, gratefully accepted the meat and coffee offered by the Sisters.
While pausing here, Forsyth observed two more columns of smoke rising over the valley to the north. Father Jutz supposed that another log schoolhouse and a shed were also in flames. As no Indians were in sight and the direction taken by the Brulé party could not be ascertained, the colonel decided to return to the agency. He sent word of his intention to General Brooke, advising also that there was now no need for Henry's squadron to follow.
Shortly after the messenger had left, however, Little Bat reported that he thought he heard sounds of firing down the creek. Forsyth knew that the hostile camp lay in that direction, and, somewhere beyond, there would be more troops from the line north of White River. Suspecting that a fight was in progress, he decided to push down the valley in a reconnaissance in force.
The valley below the mission spread out some 300 yards in width. Steep bluffs about 200 feet high on the east and 50 on the west broke into a jumble of hills that rose to the ridge lines 600 feet above the valley floor. The creek hugged the west side for about three-quarters of a mile, then turned abruptly and made a wide loop to the east and back. On the west, the bluffs gave way to a low table, which the road, after crossing the creek on a bridge, ascended. At this point the command ran into trouble.
Preston's scouts flushed a handful of warriors on the table. "You scouts turn back," shouted one, "we don't want to fight you; we want to fight the soldiers." The scouts did not argue the point, but fell back to Preston. "Let's count them," suggested the lieutenant. "Count nothing," replied Louis Shangeau, and led the scouts hastily back to the head of Whitside's squadron.
Only one man, a Cheyenne scout, stayed with Preston. The scout held Preston's horse while the lieutenant ascended the slope to the crest of the table. He saw a score or more mounted warriors on a ridge about 100 yards in his front and fired two shots at them. Forsyth was now behind him with Whitside's squadron and sent a dismounted troop to hold the position. The rest of the squadron, also dismounted, formed a skirmish line below. The led horses were sent to sheltered pockets eroded in the bluffs to the left and rear. For about two hours, both sides exchanged an ineffective, long-range fire. A stray bullet shattered a trooper's foot, but no other damage was done. Forsyth sent Little Bat back to the agency asking for the Ninth to come to the support of the Seventh. By 1:00 P.M. Henry's squadron was in the saddle.
Unaccountably, Forsyth had failed to send out flankers to secure the bluffs on either side of the valley. It was a serious omission, for the warriors worked into positions above him and on both flanks. Their fire was at long range and for the moment not very dangerous, but the valley had every prospect of becoming untenable.
Leaving two troops under Captain Ilsley to tie down the Indians and cover the retreat, Forsyth pulled back the rest of the regiment and stationed it on a low tableland about 200 yards south of the mission. Before he could extricate the covering force, however, he came under fire from three directions—from the bluffs on the east and west, and from the south, toward the agency. Sending Preston to hurry up Henry, Forsyth fought back. To neutralize the fire coming from his right, he had a Hotchkiss gun wheeled into position. As shells began to burst on the bluffs east of the valley, he deployed a skirmish line at the foot of the bluffs on the west and pushed it up the slope toward the enemy. As the line neared the top, however, the Indians opened a grazing fire that wounded two troopers and caused the rest to retreat to the foot of the ridge.
Lieutenant Preston rode about one mile toward the agency before meeting Henry and his "Brunettes," followed by the other two guns of Capron's battery. Henry was "coming at a trot," said Preston, but "his stock was so badly knocked up [as a result of the hundred-mile ride the day before] that he was unable to come much faster." The squadron reached Forsyth at 1:30 P.M., and Henry handed Forsyth a note from Brooke: "I send you Henry and his battalion. We are not yet ready to round up the Indians unless you see your way clear to making a clean sweep. I have sent a messenger to Red Cloud and others to return here."
Just then, Forsyth was not giving much thought to making a clean sweep. He had taken casualties of one killed, five wounded, and an officer, Lieutenant Mann, down with wounds that would prove fatal within a month. Some of the troopers were demoralized by the hot fire of the Indians and cowered behind a rude shack that stood on the low hill. And Ilsley's two troops, the covering force, still occupied the earlier position, unable to withdraw because of the inability of the other six troops—pressed as they were from three sides—to cover the movement.
Major Henry acted swiftly to retrieve the situation. He flung out a mounted skirmish line composed of I and K Troops (Capt. Henry H. Wright and Lt. A. W. Perry commanding) supported by a Hotchkiss gun, up the slope to the east, and another, dismounted, composed of D and F Troops (Capts. J. S. Loud and C. A. Stedman commanding) up the bluffs to the west. With artillery fire clearing the way, the lines advanced expertly into the hills—the warriors everywhere falling back. Forsyth mounted and pushed down the valley to free Ilsley from his precarious position. With D and F Troops of the Ninth driving the enemy from his front, Ilsley had no trouble pulling back across the bridge.
Simultaneously, Loud and Stedman withdrew their skirmish line from the bluffs and took new positions in the valley. Followed by this covering force, the Seventh crossed the valley, ascended the slope on the east, and, passing through Wright's and Perry's lines, headed for the agency on the reverse side of the ridge. Wright and Perry abandoned their positions and took new positions successively along the crest of the ridge. But the warriors had already called it a day and returned to camp. The troops reached the agency around dark.
The Drexel Mission affair reflected little credit on Forsyth. Ignoring an elemental maxim of tactics, he marched an entire regiment of cavalry into a cul-de-sac manned by no more than fifty Indians. Then, after battling all day, he had to be rescued by an exhausted command half his own strength. General Miles wrote indignantly to the Adjutant General:
The facts appear that a Colonel, with eight troops of cavalry, and two pieces of artillery, numbering about 400 men, allows his command to be drawn into a pocket; marches in the presence of the enemy down a valley, and proceeds to take an untenable position where his troops are commanded by hostile Indians occupying the adjacent hills and bluffs.... Whether this is the result of incompetency and inexperience or whether it is misconduct in the presence of the enemy, I leave to the General of the Army or higher authorities to determine.
That night the cavalrymen sat around their camp stoves discussing the events of the past two days, writing official reports, and relating their stories to the newspaper reporters. Near midnight, they turned out to watch a strange procession enter the agency. Herded by Oglala scouts on the flanks and rear, seventy-three Indians filed down the agency street. The men—eighteen in number—carried no arms; these had been turned over to the women. In the van, sitting his horse with quiet dignity, rode Standing Soldier, first sergeant of Lieutenant Taylor's scouts, former lieutenant of police, and later judge of the Indian court. His arrival at Pine Ridge came as a fitting climax, and also as a fitting contrast, to the two days of violence and bloodshed. For, without violence or bloodshed, without even unpleasant incident, Standing Soldier had brought in the Hunkpapa fugitives from the battle of Grand River. It was an accomplishment that, at least in retrospect, puts to shame the efforts of the generals and colonels of the Army and the agents, special agents, and inspectors of the Indian Bureau.
As we have seen, the thirty-eight Hunkpapa refugees had abandoned Big Foot on December 23 rather than submit themselves as prisoners to Colonel Sumner. They had fled toward the Missouri River, but had encountered more Hunkpapas, also refugees from the battle with McLaughlin's police. Now numbering seventy-three, they turned southwest, probably alarmed by the march of Colonel Merriam's Seventh Infantry up Cheyenne River, and headed for Pine Ridge. Scouts reported the movements during the 24th and 25th of Colonel Carr and the Sixth Cavalry, so the Indians kept well to the east, crossing White River and reaching Medicine Root Creek by the 27th.
Meanwhile, on the 25th, Lieutenant Taylor had sent Sergeant Standing Soldier and fifteen scouts from Pine Ridge Agency to help in the search for Big Foot. On the 27th they sighted the Hunkpapas. As the scouts approached, the Hunkpapas made ready to fight, but calmed down when they discovered that the strangers were not bluecoats. Standing Soldier, an able diplomat, took in the situation at a glance. Instead of demanding their guns, he listened sympathetically to the tale of woe related by the refugees. Then he informed them that he came as a friend to lead them to Pine Ridge, where they would be protected and fed. They agreed to do as the sergeant directed. He ordered his men to share their tobacco with the people and, as they were hungry, to kill several cattle from an abandoned ranch nearby.
Next day, moving southwest, the scouts and Hunkpapas cut the trail of Big Foot. Standing Soldier promptly sent three couriers to tell Big Foot to halt and wait. Camping on the second branch of Medicine Root Creek, the caravan crossed the divide to the third, or west, branch of the same creek on the morning of the 29th. About midmorning, the sound of gunfire echoed over the hills from the south. Suspecting the truth, the Hunkpapas grew frightened. Standing Soldier also suspected the truth but, thinking fast, passed around word that it was the custom of the soldiers to salute their officers with gunfire and that this was doubtless what they were now doing.
That afternoon one of the three couriers sent out on the 28th returned. Reporting to Standing Soldier, he told of the conflict at Wounded Knee. The soldiers had killed all Big Foot's people, he said, slaughtering everyone in sight. One of the scouts had been killed, and Philip Wells had had his nose cut off. The other two couriers had got scared and gone right on to the agency. Lieutenant Taylor had sent him back to tell Standing Soldier to disarm his prisoners and break up their guns.
The Oglala sergeant dismissed this piece of foolishness and instructed the courier to ride to the agency with the reply that he would bring in the Hunkpapas and turn them over to General Brooke, who could then disarm them himself if he wished. Meanwhile, would Taylor please send out some food and tobacco for the destitute prisoners? Ordering his men not to breathe a word of the Wounded Knee affair to the Hunkpapas, he led the procession across the divide to Porcupine Creek, camped for the night of the 29th at the upper crossing of Wounded Knee Creek, above the battlefield, and on the 30th headed for the agency.
During the morning's march, Chief Red Shirt and thirty scouts met the cavalcade and distributed meat and tobacco. Late at night, at the crossing of Wolf Creek, three miles east of the agency, Standing Soldier had Red Shirt ride ahead and alert Taylor and Brooke of his approach. A half-mile out he halted the Hunkpapas and faced them. Raising his right hand, he prayed to the Christian God: "God, our Father, help us that we may make peace and friendship with the Oglalas tonight." Then he said that way back in the treaties the Great Father had told the Sioux that they must live in peace with the white people. For this reason the Oglala scouts had gone to a great deal of trouble to conduct the Hunkpapas safely to the agency. They must now show their good will by turning all guns over to the women and doing just as the soldiers asked. Forming the men in line, he placed scouts on each flank and in the rear and marched into the agency.
The column drew up in front of Brooke's headquarters. Lieutenant Taylor met them and went around shaking hands with the men. Then Standing Soldier and two of the Hunkpapa leaders went to see Brooke. The Hunkpapas expressed their willingness to give up their guns and do whatever the general desired. Brooke said that he was very glad to hear this and ordered Taylor to pass out rations. The Hunkpapas moved down near the camp of the scouts and set up their own camp. They never returned to their homes at Standing Rock, preferring instead not only to "make peace and friendship with the Oglalas" but to become Oglalas in name, too. Their descendants still live at Pine Ridge as part of the Oglala tribe.
On December 31, 1890, General Miles and his staff rode into Pine Ridge Agency. They had taken the train from Rapid City to Chadron, Nebraska, and ridden from there to the agency. Headquarters, Division of the Missouri in the Field, was now set up at Pine Ridge. Miles assumed direction of the campaign against the fugitive Brulés and Oglalas. He also mapped out a campaign against Col. James W. Forsyth.
Miles had learned of the Wounded Knee fight before boarding the train in Rapid City. From Hermosa, South Dakota, on the 30th, he wired a long report of the battle to the Adjutant General, expressing annoyance at the turn of events. That Big Foot got "so near Pine Ridge Agency just at this time," he said, "has complicated the surrender of all the hostiles in the Bad Lands...;still the severity of their loss at the hands of the troops may possibly bring favorable results." His ire was directed not at Colonel Forsyth but at Colonel Sumner for letting Big Foot escape in the first place. By the time Miles reached Chadron, however, he was beginning to have doubts about Forsyth's conduct and by the time he reached Pine Ridge Forsyth had definitely replaced Sumner as the villain.
At Chadron Miles had received a telegram from General Schofield in Washington with instructions to "Give my thanks to the brave 7th Cavalry for their splendid conduct." By January 2 Miles had learned enough about Wounded Knee to reply:
Your telegram of congratulation to the 7th Cavalry is received, but as the action of the Colonel commanding will be a matter of serious consideration, and will undoubtedly be the subject of investigation, I thought it proper to advise you. In view of the fact, do you wish your telegram transmitted as it was sent? It is stated that the dispositions of the 400 soldiers and 4 pieces of artillery were fatally defective; large number of troops were killed and wounded by fire from their own ranks, and a very large number of women and children were killed in addition to the Indian men.
Schofield promptly authorized Miles to withhold the congratulatory telegram. At the same time, he sent another wire containing sentiments direct from the President. From the beginning, Harrison had been particularly sensitive to the pressures of Indian reform groups. Now the sensational reports of Wounded Knee had brought the wrath of the humanitarians down upon him, and he was very unhappy. Schofield's telegram conveyed the President's regrets at failure to solve the Sioux troubles without bloodshed and directed that "an inquiry be made as to killing of women and children on Wounded Knee Creek."
Miles lost no time. On January 4, "by direction of the President," he relieved Forsyth of command of the Seventh Cavalry and issued orders convening a full-scale court of inquiry to find out if Forsyth had disposed his troops so that they shot one another, and if his men had killed noncombatants indiscriminately.
This was not, however, what the President had meant by "inquiry." "It was not the intention of the President," Schofield wired on January 6, "to appoint a Court of Inquiry." Miles was not supposed to have relieved Forsyth by direction of the President or anyone else. "You were expected yourself first to inquire into the facts and in the event of its being disclosed that there had been unsoldierly conduct to relieve the responsible officer."
Now everyone was confused. "General Miles did it," Secretary of War Proctor told reporters. "It is a very mixed up matter and I may explain it later." But Miles had already published his orders, and in the absence of explicit instructions he had no intention of reversing them. The very next day, January 7, Maj. J. Ford Kent, division inspector general, and Capt. Frank D. Baldwin, acting assistant inspector general, constituted themselves a court of inquiry. Miles' orders had also named Col. E. A. Carr a member of the court, but he was in the field. Kent and Baldwin therefore began taking the testimony of the officers of the Seventh Cavalry.
On both specific questions at issue, the witnesses almost to a man supported Forsyth. They demonstrated convincingly, not only to the court but to the objective student who reads the transcript today, that the officers and soldiers of the Seventh, with one or two exceptions, made supreme efforts to avoid the killing of women and children. The efforts failed only because the noncombatants were mixed with the combatants and in the heat of battle could rarely be identified as such.
The witnesses also argued that Forsyth's disposition of troops had not been faulty, stressing that no one even remotely anticipated that fighting would break out, and that for the purpose of disarming the Indians the units were placed to good advantage. These arguments sounded somewhat less convincing, for no officer could quite deny that, no matter how remote the possibility of a fight, the possibility should nonetheless have been considered in deploying the troops. To nail down the point, Miles had his three orders enjoining field commanders never to let their troops mingle with Indians introduced in evidence. Questioned about whether he passed on this warning to his subordinates, however, General Brooke took refuge in an evasive explanation. It appears that he did not in fact transmit them so forcefully as Miles intended. But although it was apparent that on occasion troops had been endangered by the fire of other troops, it could not be shown that friendly fire had caused a single casualty.
Major Kent and Captain Baldwin faced an unhappy dilemma. One cannot read their opinions, especially Kent's, without gaining the impression that they wanted to clear Forsyth and forget the whole unpleasant affair. Their hearts were patently not in the goal Miles had set of placing the blame on Forsyth. For Miles did not, as law and propriety demanded, remain aloof from the proceedings. He had made up his mind before the court convened that Forsyth had blundered at Wounded Knee, he made no secret of his opinion during the proceedings, and he tried various devices while the court sat to influence its final decision. Kent and Baldwin, members of the general's staff, could not have failed to perceive which way the wind blew, and it is interesting to speculate upon how much the attitudes of General Miles shaped their written opinions.
The two officers quickly disposed of the first question. They agreed that "under the circumstances all care was taken after the Indians made the first break to preserve the lives of non-combatants," and that casualties among women and children "could be ascribed only to the fault of the Indians themselves and the force of unavoidable and unfortunate circumstances."
As for the second question, Kent and Baldwin tried to straddle the issue. They made many excuses for Forsyth and praised the behavior of the regiment. Then they censured (Kent mildly and Baldwin severely) the placement of B and K Troops in such close proximity to the Indians.
Miles was not satisfied and had the court reconvene to probe more deeply into the question whether Forsyth had received and obeyed the orders prohibiting commanders from mixing their troops with Indians. Kent and Baldwin got the idea and, after a thorough ventilation of the matter, turned in supplementary opinions condemning Forsyth much more sharply for his troop dispositions. Thus Kent: "Colonel Forsyth's command was not held at a safe distance," and "the attack of the Indians resulted in a complete surprise." And Baldwin: Miles' injunction "was entirely disregarded and lost sight of by Colonel Forsyth."
The court handed down its final opinion on January 18 at Pine Ridge, and Miles, now in Chicago, forwarded it to Washington on the 31st, with a long endorsement which in harshness of judgment went far beyond anything Kent and Baldwin had written. First, Forsyth had "received repeated warnings as to the desperate and deceitful character of Big Foot's band," and also "repeated orders as to the exercise of constant vigilance to guard against surprise." Second, "these warnings and orders were unheeded and disregarded by Colonel Forsyth, who seemed to consider an outbreak of the Indians as being beyond the pale of possibility." Third, the battle map and testimony showed "conclusively that at the beginning of the outbreak not a single company of troops was so disposed as to deliver its fire upon the warriors without endangering the lives of some of their comrades. It is in fact difficult to conceive how a worse disposition of troops could have been made." Conclusion: Forsyth not only disobeyed explicit orders but also demonstrated "incompetence" and "entire inexperience in the responsibility of exercising command where judgment and discretion are required."
Both General Schofield and Secretary Proctor thought otherwise. The evidence alone may have guided their decision, but it is not unlikely that hostility toward Miles and a fervent wish to be rid of a politically explosive issue also exerted an influence. Schofield finished reading the transcript with the judgment that "the conduct of the regiment was well worthy of the commendation bestowed upon it by me in my first telegram after the engagement," and that "the interests of the military service"—here perhaps was the key to his thinking—"do not... demand any further proceedings in this case." Secretary Proctor concurred verbosely and decreed that, "by direction of the President, Colonel Forsyth will resume the command of his regiment."
While the documents in the Wounded Knee investigation were working through channels, Miles launched another investigation of Forsyth, this one aimed at indicting him for mismanagement of the Drexel Mission fight. The Seventh Cavalry had returned to Fort Riley by the time this investigation got under way early in February, but the statements of General Brooke, Major Henry, Lieutenant Preston, and Father Jutz were taken, which provided an opportunity for Miles, in forwarding them, to loose another condemnation of Forsyth. But the supporting testimony, which did not include any statements by the participating officers of the Seventh Cavalry, was obviously inadequate. Schofield and Proctor dismissed these charges, too.
By 1895 Miles had risen to the top Army command, but his hostility appears not to have had much effect upon the career of Forsyth, who by 1894 was wearing the star of a brigadier general and who three years later rose to major general. As a further irony, when Forsyth moved up from regimental command, he was replaced as colonel of the Seventh Cavalry by Edwin V. Sumner, the officer who had let Big Foot escape and had also suffered through an investigation instigated by Miles. As the crowning rejection of his attitudes, three officers and fifteen enlisted men were awarded Medals of Honor for heroism at the Battle of Wounded Knee Creek.
On April 12, 1920, a white-mustached old man of 81, still militarily erect but displaying the wandering mind of approaching senility, called at the office of the new Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Cato Sells. With him was a delegation of Pine Ridge Sioux. Lt. Gen. Nelson A. Miles, U.S. Army Retired, explained that the survivors of the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek and the heirs of its victims, too, deserved "some remedial measures on the part of Congress," and he wanted to urge that the claim be seriously considered. It was a view he had advocated for nearly thirty years. "The action of the commanding officer," he wrote to Sells' predecessor, "was most reprehensible... and I have regarded the whole affair as most unjustifiable and worthy of the severest condemnation." As luck would have it for the old general, the matter was referred for report to the one official in the Interior Department who knew something about the subject —and about General Miles also—Indian Inspector James McLaughlin.
McLaughlin's adverse report did not end the matter. For another twenty years it came before Congressional committees time and again for exhaustive and mostly uninformed discussion. The proposal never got beyond the discussion stage and in the end proved just one more in a long series of bitter disappointments for the Sioux.
## _14. TIGHTENING THE RING_
THE BATTLE AT WOUNDED KNEE changed the entire complexion of the Pine Ridge campaign. As we have seen, on the very day of the battle Short Bull and Kicking Bear, with the diehard remnant of the Ghost Dancers, were within a day's march of the agency, where they planned to surrender. Wounded Knee not only reversed this intention but added to their ranks the frightened Brulés of Two Strike and the Oglalas of Little Wound, Big Road, and No Water—all of whom, with the unwilling Red Cloud, had stampeded from the agency at the time of the battle. The aggregation—some 4,000 people, about 800 to 1,000 warriors—set up their camp in the valley of White Clay Creek near No Water's village, about fifteen miles north of the agency.
General Miles had about 3,500 soldiers in the immediate area of operations, including nearly half the infantry and cavalry of the Army. Further removed, but participating in the campaign and subject to his orders, another 2,000 stood poised for action. Miles had already begun to pull in his lines in an attempt to contract the operational zone and prevent the Indians from returning to the Stronghold north of White River. By the early days of January 1891, the units had moved into new positions and had bottled up the refugees, once more termed hostiles, in White Clay Valley.
White River, curving around White Clay Creek on the west and north, defined the deadline for the encircled Indians. Lt. Col. R. H. Offley, with seven companies of the Seventeenth Infantry and Capt. A. B. Wells' two troops of the Eighth Cavalry, had moved down from Cheyenne River and taken station below the mouth of White Clay Creek. En route, Offley had left a force to occupy the Stronghold. His command held the center of the White River line. On his left Col. E. A. Carr and the Sixth Cavalry, which had marched from the mouth of Rapid Creek, spread down White River and up Wounded Knee Creek a short distance. Farther up Wounded Knee, Capt. F. A. Whitney, with two troops of the Ninth Cavalry and a company of the Eighth Infantry from Rosebud Agency, camped near the battleground of December 29. On Offley's right, the Fort Leavenworth Cavalry Squadron, Lt. Col. George B. Sanford commanding, held White River above the mouth of White Clay Creek. On his right, Maj. Guy V. Henry's squadron of the Ninth Cavalry and the entire Second Infantry under Col. Frank Wheaton covered White River almost to the Nebraska line. Col. William R. Shafter and five companies of the First Infantry extended along the Nebraska border south of the agency. Two more companies of the First, together with the Seventh Cavalry under Major Whitside, garrisoned Pine Ridge Agency. General Brooke placed himself with Colonel Offley at the mouth of White Clay Creek and took direct command of the White River line. Miles exercised supreme command from his headquarters at the agency, communicating with Brooke by telegraph and courier through Oelrichs.
Had they tried, the Indians would have encountered great difficulty in breaking through this formidable ring. Had they tried and succeeded, they could have fled in no direction without running into more troops. To the north and west, Col. H. M. Day and 200 South Dakota militiamen patrolled Cheyenne River as a screen for the Black Hills settlements. To the north and east, Col. H. C. Merriam's Seventh Infantry and Lt. Col. E. V. Sumner's command of the Eighth Cavalry and Third Infantry covered the upper reaches of Bad River and the lower part of Cheyenne River. Still farther north, a strong column from Fort Keogh, Montana, under Lt. Col. A. K. Arnold, and another from Fort Lincoln, North Dakota, under Maj. Henry Carroll, threw a net across southern North Dakota. East of Pine Ridge, Lt. Col. J. A. Poland's command still garrisoned Rosebud Agency. And to the south, in Nebraska, the Nebraska National Guard, under Brig. Gen. L. W. Colby, had been mobilized in regimental strength and strung along the Fremont, Elkhorn, and Missouri Valley Railroad to protect the Nebraska settlements.
The Sioux needed only one experience to demonstrate that they were tightly hemmed in and that their freedom of movement was severely restricted. On the afternoon of January 1 a party of more than fifty warriors, still wrought up over Wounded Knee and perhaps emboldened by the success at Drexel Mission two days earlier, rode out on the bluffs overlooking White River five miles above the mouth of Wounded Knee Creek. The Sixth Cavalry had passed down the valley and gone into camp at the mouth of Wounded Knee. But the regimental train of the Sixth, guarded by Capt. John B. Kerr's Troop K, was making its way slowly down the valley on the other side of the river.
Whooping the war cry, the Sioux swept down the slope, crossed the ice-choked stream, and attacked the train. Captain Kerr promptly corralled the wagons and opened fire. The sound of battle carried to Carr's camp down the river, and Maj. Tullius Cicero Tupper and two troops, followed closely by Carr with the remaining five troops, charged to the rescue. Caught in the flank by the relief column, the warriors hastily called off the attack and scattered into the hills south of the river. Firing at the retreating Indians, the cavalrymen killed or wounded six. Another three, who had dismounted and worked into positions close to the besieged train, were cut off by the sudden appearance of Carr and Tupper. Frantically, they fled afoot, trying to dodge the heavy fire of the troops. Although they succeeded in crossing the river, the Cheyenne scouts later found them in the hills, wounded, and dispatched them without formality. Kerr's losses were one horse killed and another wounded.
Also on New Year's afternoon, Henry Miller, a cook for the agency herders at the mouth of White Clay Creek, decided to ride into the agency. En route he met some Oglalas, who warned him that the main Sioux camp lay between him and the agency and that as the young men were in ugly humor he should not attempt to pass. Miller scoffed at the warning and continued on his way. Shortly, he encountered a small party of Brulé warriors. One, Kills-the-Enemy, pointed his rifle at Miller and told him to dismount. Miller obeyed. The Brulé next ordered him to throw his revolver and cartridge belt on the ground. Miller did so. Kills-the-Enemy then calmly pulled the trigger and shot his prisoner dead.
Now that fighting had broken out, Miles fortified Pine Ridge Agency. He had trenches dug and earthworks, reinforced with logs, constructed around the agency. Two companies of the First Infantry manned the defenses, and artillery commanded all the approaches.
Miles did not plan to fight, however, unless he had to. He understood Indian psychology as few other officers did, and he knew that a carefully devised policy combining gentle persuasion with a display of overwhelming force would, if not upset by rash subordinates, ultimately achieve the objective. Thus he had charged Brooke with erecting a solid blue wall along White River and Wounded Knee Creek. The military cordon was close enough to make the Indians terribly uncomfortable, but not close enough to stampede them. Miles next turned to diplomacy, sending, on January 1, a conciliatory letter to Red Cloud and another to the rest of the errant chiefs. In the next few days he sent more such messages, each promising kind and fair treatment but making abundantly clear that the Sioux must do exactly as told.
As a matter of fact, the Sioux leadership had split wide open even before Miles' letters began to arrive. The camp had no sooner been laid out on December 29 than the Oglalas began to repent their hasty flight from the agency. By uniting with the followers of Kicking Bear and Short Bull, the Oglalas had automatically acquired the label of hostile, and the maimed survivors of Wounded Knee were vivid reminders of what could happen to hostiles. Moreover, the new soldier chief at the agency was not to be trifled with. Many of the Oglala leaders had surrendered to him on the Yellowstone back in the 1870s. They remembered him as a man who spoke with a straight tongue. In 1876 he had given them a choice—surrender with the certainty of just and humane treatment, or war with the certainty of swift and terrible punishment. They had discovered then that "Bear's Coat" meant what he said; those who gave up and those who held out received exactly what had been promised. Now it was the same story. "A great many troops are on all sides," he reminded them, "but not a shot will be fired or a hand raised against any [Indians] if they do as I direct them." "I know all the wrongs that have been done the Indians and the wrongs the Indians have done. If they do whatever I tell them it will be best for all the Indians." Red Cloud, Little Wound, Big Road, and other Oglala chiefs needed no more coaxing. They were ready to trust Bear's Coat.
The Brulés were not. They stubbornly refused to recognize the hopelessness of their position. They proposed no constructive alternative to surrender and seemingly gave the matter little thought. They knew only that surrender was out of the question. In daily councils, the chiefs wrangled bitterly and inconclusively. At one council, called to consider Miles' first letter, the debate grew so heated that a "crazy boy," as Red Cloud termed him, tore up the letter, and the old chief had to get word out to Miles to send another. Kicking Bear and Short Bull, as spokesmen for the defiant young men, angrily denounced the Oglala chiefs for even suggesting surrender and vowed that no man should desert the cause. The Brulé warriors reinforced this injunction by turning back all who attempted to escape from the camp. Factional quarrels broke out, and at least two Indians were killed in altercations. On January 4 Red Cloud announced that he intended to start for the agency the next day and would fight his way out if he had to. Although nothing came of this resolve, five other leaders (Big Road, He Dog, Little Hawk, Jack Red Cloud, and High Hawk) slipped out on the 3d and spent several days conferring with Miles. The words they took back from him further strengthened the determination of the Oglalas and even weakened somewhat the resolution of the Brulés.
The Cheyenne scouts from Colonel Sanford's camp on White River maintained constant observation of the hostile camp. There were two troops, one under Lt. Louis H. Strother, enlisted from Little Chief's Cheyennes at Pine Ridge, the other under Lts. Edward W. Casey and Robert N. Getty, enlisted at the Tongue River Reservation in Montana. The latter was a crack outfit. Lieutenant Casey was widely regarded as one of the Army's most promising junior officers. Both a student and a friend of the Indian, he had won authorization to organize the scout troop over the opposition of Commissioner of Indian Affairs Morgan, who believed military service incompatible with progress in civilization. At Fort Keogh, Casey had brought his scouts to a peak of efficiency, discipline, and morale, and since joining Sanford's command on December 24 they had performed outstanding service. Almost daily some of Casey's scouts met warriors from the hostile camp and exchanged news in a friendly manner. On January 6 a half-dozen or so men from the camp visited Casey at his bivouac. Their reports of the sentiment in the camp led him to believe that he might accomplish much by personally conferring with some of the Sioux leaders.
The next morning, January 7, Casey and two scouts set forth up the valley of White Clay. They met a small party of Sioux butchering a cow and chatted pleasantly for a time. Here one of the Cheyennes turned back. Casey and the other, White Moon, rode up the valley. Soon they met another Indian, Bear-Lying-Down, and stopped to talk. The lieutenant asked Bear-Lying-Down to ride back to the Indian camp and request one of the chiefs to come down for a parley. If none would do so, he was to ask Red Cloud himself to come. At the camp, Bear-Lying-Down told his story to He Dog, who went to Red Cloud's lodge. There, a number of Oglala chiefs were in the midst of a council. They had just decided to try to slip out of camp later in the morning and go to the agency for a talk with General Miles. He Dog relayed Casey's message, and Red Cloud called Bear-Lying-Down into the tepee to tell his story personally. After he had finished talking, Red Cloud instructed him to go back to the officer and tell him that he must leave the area immediately for there were hot-headed young men all around who might try to kill him. As Bear-Lying-Down turned to depart, He Dog also asked Red Cloud's half-breed relative, Pete Richard, who could speak English, to go. The two men, Pete and Bear-Lying-Down, hastened back down the creek. They met Casey and White Moon a mile and a half from camp, riding up the valley with two Brulés, Broken Arm and a Carlisle graduate named Plenty Horses.
Richard shook hands with Casey and asked where he was going. General Brooke had sent him, answered the officer, to confer with the chiefs. Richard explained that Red Cloud was going in to talk with Miles and had sent word for the lieutenant to turn back. The young men were dangerous, just as if they were drunk or crazy, and one might take a shot at the blue uniform. Casey reluctantly agreed to give up his plan and return to White River. Both Richard and the lieutenant were just turning their mounts when Plenty Horses, astride his horse four or five feet to the left and rear of Casey, raised his Winchester and shot the officer through the back of the head. Casey fell to the ground dead. The murderer sauntered off toward the camp. White Moon, the Cheyenne, started to flee, but Richard called him back and told him to take Casey's gear to camp. The Cheyenne refused and at the same time signed to Bear-Lying-Down, "Why don't you shoot Plenty Horses?" "Why don't you shoot him yourself?" Bear-Lying-Down signed in answer. White Moon took Casey's horses but left the body lying on the road. Lieutenant Getty, who succeeded to command of the scouts, rode out with the troop in the afternoon and recovered the body.
Red Cloud failed in his plan to break away from camp that day. But the police measures adopted by the Brulés to prevent defections had begun to disintegrate under the pressure of Miles' blandishments. That day, seventy Oglalas managed to elude the Brulé pickets and escape to the protection of Miles' fortifications. They reported more coming in the next day. Late at night, while the rest of the camp slept, Red Cloud, He Dog, Jack Red Cloud, and White Hawk gathered up their families and stole away. They successfully reached Pine Ridge on the morning of January 8, and throughout the day another seventy-five Oglalas made good their escape.
Either on the 7th or the 8th, Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, one of the most influential of Sioux chiefs, arrived at Pine Ridge. With some of his people, he had been visiting the Crows in Montana for the past two months. Miles had sent an officer to intercept the return march of the party at Newcastle, Wyoming, and hasten the chief by rail to Rushville. As soon as he reached the agency, Miles sent him into the hostile camp to exert his influence in behalf of peace.
The rising number of Oglala defections, combined with the influence of Young-Man-Afraid and the other Oglala chiefs still in camp, Little Wound and Big Road, began to confuse the Brulé leaders. They were no longer so certain of the correctness of the course they had adopted, and gradually their opposition to surrender broke down. But they still could not bring themselves to make the final plunge. It was time, Miles perceived, to reinforce diplomacy by drawing the military cordon a shade tighter. On January 7, as the Oglala defectors began to reach the agency in increasing numbers, he alerted General Brooke to prepare plans for moving the White River-Wounded Knee line toward the agency. Two days later, receiving a report from Young-Man-Afraid that the Brulés had reluctantly consented to move the camp a little closer to the agency on the 10th, Miles gave the order for Brooke to move at the same time.
Very slowly, on the morning of the 10th, the Indians crawled up White Clay Valley, arguing all the way over the advisability of moving at all. Very slowly, Brooke, with Offley and Sanford, followed. The next day, January 11, the camp moved again, this time halting at Drexel Mission, five miles north of the agency. Again Brooke pushed in behind the Sioux. "The situation is so delicate," he reported to Miles, "that any premature move might cause a stampede [and] I have been exceedingly cautious and at the same time watching them closely."
The Ghost Dance leaders and the Brulés had not really given in. They still opposed surrender. But each morning, disconcertingly, they awoke to find a sprawling military camp in their rear and the Oglalas packing for the day's journey. Unwillingly but irresistibly, they were being drawn slowly toward the agency. They broke camp at noon on the 12th and traveled two miles. Brooke marched to the mission and went into camp just as the last Indians were leaving. White Tail, a Brulé subchief, came back and begged Brooke not to follow too closely. That night, at Brooke's order, Wheaton's Second Infantry and Henry's squadron of the Ninth Cavalry strengthened the command at the mission, and one of Carr's squadrons of the Sixth Cavalry took station a few miles east of the Indian camp. In the next two days, while the Indians mustered courage for the final march, the whole Wounded Knee line—Carr and Whitney—closed in on the Sioux from the east while Wheaton and Henry blocked all escape to the west. Shafter marched the First Infantry to within three miles of the agency on the south. The stage had been expertly set for the final act.
The surrender on January 15 was something of an anticlimax, with none of the ceremony befitting the end of the biggest military operation in the United States since the Civil War. The surrender, in fact, had been going on for a week as defectors from the fugitive village streamed into the agency. Even so, the display of aboriginal might, the last in the long history of Indian warfare, was impressive enough. "It was a spectacle worth beholding," recalled one officer. "They moved in two columns up White Clay Creek, one on each side, about 5500 [closer to 4,000] people in all, with 7000 horses, 500 wagons, and about 250 travois, and in such good order that there was not at any point a detention on any account.... The rear and right flank of this mass was covered during the movement by a force of infantry and cavalry deployed in skirmish order, and moved with a precision that was a surprise to all who witnessed it."
With the Sixth and Ninth Cavalry on the east, the Seventh Cavalry on the south, the First and Second Infantry on the west, and the Seventeenth Infantry and Fort Leavenworth Cavalry on the north, the hostiles, once more within the fold, pitched an immense camp that stretched for three miles on both sides of White Clay Creek. Capt. E. P. Ewers, whom Miles had summoned from Cheyenne River Agency, took charge of the "prisoners of war." Big Road sent word that he was collecting rifles—there would be no repetition of Wounded Knee if the Indians could help it —and he soon turned in 200 stand of arms. Miles knew there were more, but knowing also that it was impossible to keep an Indian weaponless for very long, he did not press the matter. The only formal surrender came when Kicking Bear, rifle in hand, faced Miles. The two stared at each other for a moment, a hint of defiance in the eyes of the Ghost Dance apostle, a trace of determination in the eyes of the general. Perhaps they recalled a similar scene in 1877, when Kicking Bear had once before surrendered to Miles. Kicking Bear laid his weapon at Miles' feet, and the Ghost Dance uprising was over.
Three days later, while the Indians were still uneasy and a bit suspicious of military intentions, news reached the agency that very nearly caused another stampede.
On the evening of January 10, a small party of Indians returning from a hunt near Bear Butte camped on the Belle Fourche at the mouth of Alkali Creek, halfway between Fort Meade and Colonel Merriam's camp at the forks of the Cheyenne. There were two Oglala families—Few Tails and his wife Clown, and One Feather and his wife Red Owl. The latter couple had two daughters, one thirteen years old and the other an infant. The hunt had been successful, and the two wagons were loaded with close to 1,500 pounds of meat. The Indians picketed their ponies and put up two tepees. They were preparing dinner when a soldier rode up. He was Sgt. Frank Smith, Eighth Cavalry, in charge of a courier station at Quinn's Ranch, seven miles away. He asked what they were doing off the reservation. Few Tails produced a written pass, signed by Agent Royer, authorizing the group to hunt near Bear Butte. Satisfied that the Indians were an inoffensive hunting party, Smith returned to his station.
Next morning the Sioux packed and resumed their journey toward Pine Ridge. They had driven only 300 yards when, from a sage-covered knoll in front of them, a burst of rifle fire stopped them. Few Tails and Clown, riding the lead wagon, caught the first volley. Few Tails slumped dead in the driver's seat, a bullet through his face and one in his chest. Bullets cut down both horses. Clown jumped out of the wagon. A bullet hit her in the leg and another in the breast, and she sprawled on the ground next to the wagon.
One Feather frantically turned his wagon around to flee in the opposite direction. A bullet struck his wife, wounding her. His two daughters cowered amid the meat in the wagon bed. One Feather lashed his horses. The attackers, three white men, mounted and raced to cut off the speeding wagon. Blocked, One Feather turned around again. With the pursuers firing from close behind, he veered from the road and bounced across the prairie, up the slope of the divide between the Belle Fourche and Elk Creek. At the top, he turned over the reins to his wounded wife and with his rifle jumped from the wagon. Several shots delayed the white men long enough for him to catch one of the loose horses and climb on it. As the wagon rattled down the other side of the divide, he conducted a vigorous rear-guard action that kept the assailants at a safe distance. At Elk Creek One Feather made a stand, and the whites, now numbering only two, dismounted to take cover.
Back at Quinn's Ranch, Sergeant Smith had left for the day, but four privates were on duty. Andrew Culbertson, a nearby rancher, arrived with several other cowboys. He reported that he and his two brothers, Pete and Nelson, had been fired upon by some Sioux engaged in a horse-stealing expedition and asked the soldiers to help catch them. Accompanied by Culbertson and the others, two of the soldiers rode swiftly to Elk Creek. Pete and Nelson Culbertson were still there, exchanging shots with One Feather. The reinforcements joined the battle. One Feather had started his family southward in the wagon and soon followed them. Whenever the whites drew too close, he turned and shot at them. One Feather decided to abandon the wagon in order to make better time. He placed the two girls on one pony, and he and his wife mounted the other. "After a while," he later explained, "the mounted men came to where the wagon was, and commenced shooting and shouting, and that was the last I saw of them."
Nearly two weeks later, on January 24, the family made its way into Rosebud Agency. Red Owl was weak from the effects of her wound, and the infant had died of starvation and exposure on Pass Creek, but their very presence at the agency, alive, testified to the courage, skill, and endurance of the One Feather family.
Clown, wife of the dead Few Tails, had suffered an even more fearful ordeal. Through the day and night of January 11 she had lain on the ground, wounded in the leg and chest, next to the wagon containing her dead husband.
And then I got up [she later told the story], and saw that one horse was not killed, and I got on him, and came to a house on Elk Creek, and I knew the people living there, and they opened the door for me.... When they opened the door there were two men inside and they got their guns and one of them loaded his gun, and they pointed their guns at me, and the white girls inside said something I don't know what it was, and they took their guns off me. One man came to me, and motioned to me to go away, and I hurried as fast as I could to get away.
After I left the house, which was about evening, I saw a wagon track and I knew it was One Feather's wagon, and I saw tracks of horsemen right behind it, and that evening I came to the mouth of Rapid Creek, where there is a store, at which I traded a great deal, but I was afraid I would cause trouble again, so I did not go in the store. I travelled all that night, resting occasionally, and then came to the foot of the Bad Lands and heard wagons rattle, and listened and the wagons came right near me, and when the wagons passed they were only a short distance away.... After that I travelled every night, resting day time until I got here at the beef corral. Then I was very tired.
It was the morning of January 18, and she had reached the beef corral east of Pine Ridge Agency, 100 miles from the Belle Fourche. The Sixth Cavalry was camped at the corral, and that morning Gus Craven, Carr's civilian guide, found Clown lying on a hill behind his tent. He summoned some troopers, and they carried the woman, nearly dead from wounds and exposure, to the hospital tent. The regimental surgeon dressed her wounds and had her transferred to the Indian hospital in Reverend Cook's chapel at the agency. Here, almost miraculously, she was nursed back to health.
Word of Few Tails' death spread through the great camps of Sioux at Pine Ridge, for Few Tails was an important man and a relative of Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses. While the camps bustled with activity, scores of men began to saddle their ponies and round up cattle. Miles quickly summoned Young-Man-Afraid and tried to pacify him, but made little headway. Only the greatest persuasive efforts on the part of Miles and his officers succeeded in restoring order and averting serious trouble. Fortunately, official reports of the investigation of the murder arrived from Colonel Merriam that same day, and the chiefs were shown that civilians, not soldiers, had perpetrated the deed.
Colonel Merriam had started an investigation at once, sending Lt. F. C. Marshall to examine the scene of the action and interview the participants. The Culbertson brothers claimed that the Few Tails party had stolen horses from them and had opened fire when approached. But Marshall's careful reconstruction of the event, based on the position of the wagon and of Few Tails' wounds in relation to the piles of cartridges that identified the site where the three brothers had waited in ambush, cast grave doubt on the explanation. Pete Culbertson, an ex-convict, himself gave away his motives when he boasted to Sergeant Smith, "I have shot one of those damned Government pets, and if any more of them want to be fixed, let them come this way." Maj. J. Ford Kent later conducted another investigation that supported Marshall's findings. Kent, Marshall, Merriam, and Miles all branded the act unprovoked murder, and after One Feather, Red Owl, and Clown told stories that confirmed the military reports, there could no longer be any question that it was indeed murder.
General Miles moved quickly to set the machinery of justice in motion, to prosecute the murderers not only of Few Tails but also of Lieutenant Casey and Herder Henry Miller. Few Tails had been killed when off the reservation, in Meade County, South Dakota, so Miles turned over all the papers in the case to Governor Arthur C. Mellette and recommended that the Culbertsons be tried in the state courts. At the same time he ordered the arrest of Plenty Horses for the killing of Casey, and the arrest of a Brulé named Young Skunk erroneously accused of killing Miller. These crimes had been committed on the reservation and thus came within the jurisdiction of the United States courts. Asked to help apprehend these men, Young-Man-Afraid replied, "No, I will not surrender them; but if you will bring the white men who killed Few Tails, I will bring the Indians who killed the white soldier and the herder; and right out here in front of your tepee I will have my young men shoot the Indians, and you have your soldiers shoot the white men, and then we will be done with the whole business; they were all bad men." The charges against Young Skunk were dropped, but Plenty Horses was arrested on February 18 and immediately sent to Fort Meade for confinement until court convened.
The plight of Plenty Horses aroused the sympathy of most of the high-ranking officers in Dakota, who believed that his deed, occurring in time of war, did not properly come under the criminal law. He had no money to hire a lawyer; his relatives at Rosebud, although they tried, could not raise the necessary money; and the Indian Bureau had no funds for such a purpose. Finally, Plenty Horses' jailor, Lt. Col. E. V. Sumner, brought the matter to the attention of the Indian Rights Association, which hired a defense counsel.
The Federal Grand Jury met at Deadwood in March 1891, with V. T. McGillycuddy as foreman. In his testimony, the young Brulé explained why he had killed Casey and at the same time unwittingly delivered a bitter commentary on the efforts of the eastern idealists to rush the Indian down the road to civilization. "I am an Indian," he said. "Five years I attended Carlisle and was educated in the ways of the white man. I was lonely. I shot the lieutenant so I might make a place for myself among my people. Now I am one of them. I shall be hung and the Indians will bury me as a warrior. They will be proud of me. I am satisfied."
Plenty Horses had admitted his crime, and the Grand Jury had no choice but to indict him. The trial took place in the Federal District Court at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in April. The jury could not agree on whether the offense should be murder or manslaughter. In another trial, in June, the judge ruled that Plenty Horses had acted as a combatant during a state of war and could not be held liable under criminal law. The jury therefore returned a verdict of not guilty, and Plenty Horses went home to Rosebud, a free man.
The Culbertsons, too, were finally brought to trial, although it took considerable prodding from the local United States Attorney, who in turn was being pressed by the United States Attorney General to use every proper means to secure justice. The States Attorney, Alex McCall, wrote Commissioner of Indian Affairs Morgan on March 18, "While the views of our people, and those expressed by you are wide apart touching the question of public policy in dealing with these semi-barbarous offenders against peace and dignity of the nation [the Sioux], yet public sentiment here is well nigh universal in favor of a vigorous prosecution of the perpetrators of this apparently unwarranted attack and cold blooded slaughter of Few Tails." But, he said, Meade County was poor, and the United States Departments of Justice and the Interior would have to help bear the cost.
Although a few Black Hills newspapers and some influential citizens such as McGillycuddy spoke out for energetic prosecution, public sentiment was by no means so widespread as McCall represented it. The trial began in Sturgis on June 22 and, despite overwhelming evidence of the guilt of the Culbertsons, ended on July 2 in acquittal. As McCall explained a year later, when another Sioux fell victim to a rancher's rifle, in Meade County "a white man cannot be convicted for the killing of an Indian."
The campaign, and with it the last Indian war, had finally closed. It had been expensive. In less than two months, more than 350 people had lost their lives, and another 50 to 100 or more nursed wounds received in the fighting. Total expenses, public and private, that were recorded amounted to nearly $1,200,000—"a significant commentary," remarked James Mooney, "on the bad policy of breaking faith with Indians."
At Pine Ridge, the great army assembled by General Miles remained patiently in camp for a week after the surrender. At last, on January 21, assignment of the regiments to new stations had been made, and the general held a grand review of his troops. On the 15th, the Indians had paraded in martial splendor for the last time in the Indian wars. Now it was the Army's turn, and the correspondent for _Harper's Weekly_ did it justice.
There were many stirring and grandly picturesque scenes at Pine Ridge during the closing of the late campaign against the ghost-dancing Sioux, but the one of most absorbing interest was the final review by General Miles of his 3500 soldiers, who had marched through sand-storms and blizzards in order to complete the cordon of bayonets that was to slowly drive the savages to unconditional surrender.
The night before the review, haranguers, with little medicine bags tied about their strange garments, went through the villages of the hostile and sullen Brules and the peaceable Ogallalas, telling their people of the military demonstration which was to take place in the morning.
When the sun came up, the ridges skirting the agency to the east and west were fringed with Indians, who looked like Arab sheiks in their white sheets and hooded heads. Not a squaw was to be seen among all these ghostly figures, so distinctly outlined against the horizon. Statuesque and haughty, the warriors stood watching the flying columns of cavalrymen and the explosive efforts of the cannoneers as they urged their animals into line. Down in the same valley, where the troops were hurriedly preparing for their maneuvres, but nearly a mile away to the north, were the great Indian villages, with the squaws corralling their thousands of ponies, as a precautionary measure against any possible hostile demonstration on the part of the army.
General Miles was not in uniform as he sat astride a big coal-black horse, which stood on the crest of a knoll on the right flank of the advancing column of soldiers. Even his three-starred epaulets [two-starred], the only evidences of his rank, were beneath a great overcoat which was buttoned almost to his ears. Just as the column, with screaming trumpets, began to pass General Miles, a furious sand storm swept through the valley. It cloaked the silent Indian villages in a yellow, swirling shroud, and then tearing along as though blown from a funnel, pierced the most compact lines of infantrymen who were marching with a swinging stride behind Colonel Shafter. From their perches on the summits of the snow-flecked buttes, the hooded warriors must have thought that the long line of men and horses below had stampeded, for that terrible torrent of sand completely cloaked the army to the vision of those who were above the phenomenal current of air.
There was no cheering during all the time the great column passed in review. Now and then General Miles' black hat went off to the flash of a saluting sabre held by a muffled figure that was crouching before the choking blast, but it was not until the Sixth Cavalry, with grim old General Carr at its head, passed in review that the idol of the Indian fighters showed the keen interest he was taking in the demonstration. Again and again his black sombrero fell as Carr's sword gleamed from his fur cap to his spurs. And when the black scowling faces of the Ninth Cavalry passed in close lines behind the glittering carbines held at a salute, General Miles waved his gloved hand to Colonel Henry, whose gaunt figure was almost lost in the folds of his buffalo overcoat. Three weeks before, these black troopers rode 100 miles without food or sleep to save the Seventh cavalrymen, who were slowly being crushed by the Sioux in the valley at the Catholic Mission. Then they dashed through the flanks of the savages, and after sweeping the ridges with carbine and pistol, lifted the white troopers out of the pocket with such grace that after the battle was over the men of both regiments hugged one another on the field.
When the trumpeters of the Seventh Cavalry got in front of General Miles they blew a shrill blast, and passed on into the blinding storm. Then the musicians from Angel Island [First Infantry Band] played "Garryowen." This was Custer's charging music, and as the famous regiment came over the yellow knolls in company front and carbines at a salute, the horses began to dance to the irresistible melody. Major Whitside was in command. He had no sword, but he waved his hand. General Miles' emotion was now so intense that he hung his hat on the pommel of his saddle and let the storm toss his gray hair as far as it pleased. The capes of the troopers were flung back, exposing the lemon-colored linings, and the fur caps were tied in such a way under the chin that they gave the wind-tanned faces a peculiarly grim expression. The scars of three days' fighting were plainly visible in this grand regiment.
There were men missing in every troop, and poor Captain Wallace and brave Lieutenants Mann and Garlington were also gone. A second lieutenant, with a bandaged head, was the only officer of little K Troop; and bringing up the rear was B Troop, with one-third of its men either in graves or hospital cots.
The column was almost pathetically grand, with its bullet-pierced gun-carriages, its tattered guidons, and its long lines of troopers and foot soldiers facing a storm that was almost unbearable. It was the grandest demonstration by the army ever seen in the West; and when the soldiers had gone to their tents, the sullen and suspicious Brules were still standing like statues on the crests of the hills.
## _15. THE FINAL RECKONING_
GENERAL MILES left Pine Ridge for Chicago on the evening of January 26. He took with him twenty-five Ghost Dance leaders, including Kicking Bear and Short Bull, whom he intended to confine at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, until passions had subsided enough for them to return to their people. Buffalo Bill Cody, who had turned up at Pine Ridge in the last days of the campaign as a colonel on the staff of the governor of Nebraska, asked to employ the prisoners as part of the troupe of his Wild West show, which was about to embark on a European tour. The chance to get these troublemakers out of the country for a year, and at the same time to relieve the Army of their support, appealed to Miles, and he heartily endorsed Cody's application. But Commissioner of Indian Affairs Morgan regarded circus life as demoralizing and had publicly announced that no more Indians would be permitted to leave the reservation for exhibition purposes. Cody went to the Nebraska congressional delegation and had sufficient pressure applied to Secretary Noble to get the ban lifted, and the prisoners, together with other Sioux recruited at Pine Ridge, joined the show for a profitable trip across the great waters.
Before leaving Pine Ridge, Miles had issued orders disposing of the Indians from other agencies who had gathered there during the campaign. Capt. Jesse M. Lee, who had been military agent for the Brulés in 1876 and 1877, left Pine Ridge on January 31 with 635 Brulés and escorted them across the reservation to Rosebud Agency. Another 141 had already gone of their own accord a week or so earlier. A sergeant of the Sixth Cavalry conducted to Cheyenne River Agency a miscellaneous assortment of seventy-one Indians—largely Miniconjou survivors of Wounded Knee but including also a few Hunkpapas and Brulés. Capt. E. P. Ewers took all of Little Chief's Cheyennes, about 500 in number, to Tongue River Reservation in Montana. These Indians had been residents of Pine Ridge since 1881. Miles believed that they belonged with their kinsmen and, pleading military necessity, had beaten down the protests of the Indian Bureau and transferred them to the north. In May, 254 Hunkpapa prisoners at Fort Sully, refugees from the Grand River fight, were finally released and shipped up the river to Standing Rock.
Still at Pine Ridge were the seventy-three Hunkpapas brought in by Sergeant Standing Soldier after Wounded Knee. They refused to go back to Standing Rock, and although Colonel Shafter, commanding at Pine Ridge, recommended that they be forcibly returned Brooke and Miles viewed their attitude with more compassion and permitted them to stay at Pine Ridge. Another 600 to 800 Brulés also remained as prisoners of war. They were the Wazhazhas from Pass Creek who were still waiting for a settlement of the Rosebud-Pine Ridge boundary problem to see which agency they belonged to. They were restless and hard to control, and they vowed never to return to Rosebud.
The departure of General Miles from Pine Ridge did not end his concern for conditions among the Sioux. Any other general sent to Dakota to suppress the Sioux outbreak would have accomplished this superficially military mission and then withdrawn, leaving the civilian administrators to put things back in order. Not General Miles. He did not trust civilian adminstrators, and he regarded himself as the top expert on the Sioux in the country. With an attitude of smug superiority that infuriated officials of the Indian Bureau, he invaded their preserve and sought to push through his own program for the salvation of the Sioux.
As a matter of fact, he probably _was_ the top expert on the Sioux, and his program was rooted in a sounder appreciation of realities than any the Bureau had been able to devise. First, he believed it essential for the Government to win the confidence of the Sioux. A good start could be made by immediately fulfilling the promises of the Crook Commission. "Congress has been in session several weeks," he telegraphed Senator Dawes as early as December 19, "and could if it were disposed in a few hours confirm the treaties [i.e. agreements] that its Commissioners have made with these Indians, and appropriate the necessary funds for its part of the compact." Second, it was patently all wrong to try to starve Indians into learning to support themselves. Rations had to be restored to adequate levels and kept there until the Indians had actually become self-supporting. Third, the soil and climate of Dakota would always prevent agriculture from furnishing the means of subsistence, and the cherished farming program ought to be junked in favor of stock raising. "I do not think any one thing would please those Indians more," he wrote in March 1891, "than to give each family, as far as possible, the Angus or Galloway cattle, which come nearer to their dream of the restoration of the buffalo than anything else." Finally, the Sioux and Cheyennes should be placed under authoritarian rule, which meant military rule. Even before leaving for Dakota in December, Miles had recommended the assignment of Army officers as agents on the Sioux and Cheyenne reservations. By press interviews, by an article in the January issue of _North American Review_ , and by correspondence both in and out of proper channels, General Miles vigorously championed his views.
The first item on the program, action intended to instill confidence, was accomplished even before Miles left Pine Ridge. As Little Wound later explained it, "We could not make our Great Father hear us, until we all got out and made a _big noise._ " If the newspapers could be credited, the Indians had indeed made a big noise, and Congress was impressed. On January 19, 1891, the President fixed his signature to hastily enacted legislation designed to make good the promises of the Crook Commission: for educational purposes, $165,000; for compensating the Indians of Standing Rock and Cheyenne River "deprived by the authority of the United States of ponies in the year 1876, at the rate of forty dollars for each pony," $200,000 (the Oglalas had already been compensated for their losses); and, at long last, "To enable the Secretary of the Interior to purchase for the Sioux Nation of Indians additional beef required for issue, the rations having been reduced on account of reduced appropriation for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1890, $100,000." A month later, the national lawmakers demonstrated that they remembered the big noise in Dakota. In the Indian Appropriation Act for fiscal 1892 they appropriated $1,100,000 for subsistence and civilization of the Sioux, $100,000 to compensate the "friendly Sioux" for property destroyed by the Ghost Dancers during their dash to the Stronghold in November, and $6,000 to negotiate a settlement of the Pine Ridge-Rosebud boundary problem.
With Congress acting kindly toward the Sioux, General Miles decided that it would be fitting to send a party of chiefs to Washington. They could present their grievances to the President and the Secretary of the Interior, and in turn be assured of fair treatment in the future. He requested authority for his plan on January 13, before the final surrender, and set about putting together a delegation that would represent all the agencies and both progressive and nonprogressive factions. Although Miles planned to have the chiefs escorted to Washington by an Army officer, much to his annoyance the Indian Bureau stepped in and won the President's permission to manage the excursion without military participation. Commissioner Morgan sent a subordinate, T. W. Blackburn, to conduct the chiefs to Washington. On February 4 thirty checked in at two Third-Street boarding-houses.
As Miles had conceived it, the conference was supposed to put the chiefs in a happy frame of mind. It had the reverse effect. For the Sioux, a council with officials in Washington was a solemn and portentous occasion. It required, as councils on important matters always had, much oratory and unhurried discussion of the issues. But the Washington officials were busy men and could not find time for the sort of council the chiefs had in mind.
The delegation was escorted to the White House to hear the President make a brief and somewhat threatening talk, then was ushered into the presence of Secretary Noble. It was, reported a correspondent, "a curious and suggestive gathering.... The room was small, and crowded to its capacity. There was a desk at one end, and behind it sat the venerable Secretary of the Interior, with white hair and an expression of alternate amusement and concern. Behind and around him was grouped a distinguished array of men and women—high officials and their wives and daughters." The chiefs sat facing Noble. "They looked absurdly out of place and out of harmony. They were in an office in the midst of civilization, sitting on office chairs ranged in rows as at a town-hall meeting.... They wore cheap, ill-fitting store-clothes, white shirts, old-fashioned collars, curious neckties. They held in their hands white men's hats."
The Indians had elected John Grass, American Horse, YoungMan-Afraid-of-His-Horses, Hump, Two Strike, High Hawk, and Hollow-Horn-Bear to do the talking, and they had prepared long speeches to make to the Secretary. But the Secretary explained at the beginning that the speeches must be brief. "Did you ever know," American Horse asked indignantly, "of a man who had prepared himself to make a long speech and then be told that his speech would have to be cut short? Did such speech ever amount to anything?" "It is a good thing to make a short speech," the Secretary replied curtly. Well, then, said American Horse, "Is there any possibility of seeing you, say three, four or even five times?" "No," answered Noble. "If you cannot do it in a reasonable time you will have to settle it on the agency, and I wish you would address yourself to the subject of this conference." And so it went throughout the week that the delegation remained in Washington. The chiefs could not say what they wanted to say because no one had the time or patience to listen. They returned home in an angry mood, but not before YoungMan-Afraid had asked some embarrassing questions:
The troubles spring from seed. The seed was sown long ago by the white man not attending truthfully to his treaties after a majority of our people had voted for them. When the white man speaks, the government and the army see that we obey. When the red man speaks, it goes in at one ear and out of the other. The Indian is for eternity interested in the subject, the white man only when he comes into office for two or three years. I am not an old man, but I have seen many Great Fathers and his headmen.
Why was not the late treaty fixed promptly by the Great Council? Why were our rations cut down a million of pounds? Why have not our winter annuities come? Why was the whole Sioux nation called to account for dancing a religious dance? Why are the agents always being changed? Why was Agent Gallagher discharged when he wrote that our crops had failed, and our rations must not be cut down?... And why does not the blame for what followed belong to the white men?
In March, after the chiefs had gone home, General Miles pointed out that the purpose of sending the delegation to Washington was "to restore and promote confidence and loyalty." "The result," because of the way they had been treated, "has been just the reverse."
I consider it most unfortunate that these men have been ignored, discouraged and disaffected, and believe that prompt and immediate action should be taken by the Government to correct what has been done, and I earnestly recommend it in the interest of peace in the future. The danger is not now from the hostile element, the leaders of which are either dead or under military surveillance, but from those who have heretofore been loyal, and were represented by the men I originally selected to go to Washington.
The other items on Miles' Sioux program were closely interrelated. He championed military rule of the agencies not only because he was convinced of the necessity for authoritative government but also because he was convinced that military agents could best advance the Sioux toward self-support. The advocacy of military rule stirred up violent controversy, as it had before, notably in the 1870s. It aroused powerful opposition because it threatened the prerogatives of the Interior Department and the patronage of congressmen, and because it struck at the fundamentals of enlightened Indian policy as conceived by reformers in and out of government. But it also won powerful support from those who believed that only military agents could rescue Indian administration from the corruption and inefficiency that had burdened it from the beginning.
The press reflected the points of view. Thus the Omaha _Daily Bee:_ "The army is not a civilizing agency. Its contact with the Indians has always been demoralizing to the soldier and brutalizing for the red race. The military in charge of the Indian would simply emphasize the frontiersman's motto, 'A dead Injun is a good Injun.' " And the _Chicago Tribune:_ "Quaker government has been tried and failed. Church government has been tried and failed. Indian trader and agent government has been tried and worse than failed, for greed, ignorance, and dishonesty have been the outcome of political appointments. Government by the impracticable ideas of visionaries and enthusiasts, a thousand miles away, who never saw an Indian, has been tried, but it is the same old story of failure. What remains now but the government 'just and strong'?" (The words were borrowed from Miles' article in _North American Review_.) Commissioner Morgan expressed the view of the Indian Bureau without equivocation. Asked by Secretary Noble whether the Sioux agencies should be turned over to the Army, Morgan wrote, "To this I answer unhesitatingly—No.... The one great and all important object which the nation has set before itself is to civilize and make [the Indians] intelligent, self-supporting citizens. This is essentially a civil process, to be brought about by civil measures and agencies."
Miles enjoyed two significant tactical advantages—first, that the agents, especially D. F. Royer, had spectacularly failed to contain the Ghost Dance mania; and second, that he himself was actually, if not theoretically, running the Sioux reservations. As soon as he reached Pine Ridge on December 31, with Wounded Knee still fresh in the minds of the nation, he began agitating for appointment to the Sioux agencies of the candidates he had recommended on December 11. A master at deliberately misunderstanding instructions and at exceeding authority just enough to get his way without provoking more than a reprimand from his superiors, he won a fuller victory than anyone in Washington intended.
Pine Ridge presented no problem, for not even the Indian Bureau was prepared to defend Royer. In fact, Commissioner Morgan had recommended his removal on December 12. Thus the President and the officials of the War and Interior Departments were willing to let Miles have an officer for agent at Pine Ridge but were not, despite his ominous predictions of trouble, going to suffer through the open interdepartmental war that his proposal in full would set off. General Schofield informed Miles on January 7 that the military agent at Pine Ridge would have complete control, but that no other officers would be appointed agents. Those nominated by Miles could be assigned temporarily to the other agencies, but only to exercise, in keeping with the President's directive of November 13, such military control as might prove necessary. "This conclusion," said Schofield with intended finality, "is regarded as a final settlement of the question."
Miles' protest—"The authority is not sufficient, and may complicate and embarrass matters"—fell on deaf ears, so he went blandly about attaining his ends anyway. His officers were all strong personalities and could be expected to dominate the civilian agents, with the exception of McLaughlin. Even though the agents were nominally in control, Miles knew who would actually manage the reservations. If the officers failed to perceive what he expected of them, he spelled it out in the order of January 12 that assigned them. Most of General Order No. 2 dealt with the military surveillance contemplated by Washington, but three paragraphs carried significant implications:
VI. As idleness and insufficient food are frequently the causes of discontent and hostility, they [the officers] will ascertain to what extent the Indians are occupied, and whether or not rations are sufficient. They will also report the number engaged in civil occupation and the number acting as police or scouts.
VII. As occupation is one of the best measures for the promotion of peace, they will ascertain and report what additional occupation could be afforded these people on the reservation, or in the immediate vicinity, and also whether means of occupation cannot be devised and developed in addition to agriculture and pastoral pursuits, and whether or not they could manufacture all the clothing, leather, agricultural implements and tools required—in fact any industries that would promote their comfort and welfare, and encourage them in peaceful pursuits.
VIII. They will also ascertain whether they realize from the means of occupation afforded them the full benefits, and whether any improvements can be made in that respect.
The order named Capt. E. P. Ewers to Tongue River Reservation in Montana, Capt. Jesse M. Lee to Rosebud, Capt. Joseph H. Hurst to Cheyenne River, and Capt. F. E. Pierce to Pine Ridge. Significantly, for McLaughlin's supporters had rallied to his defense, nothing was said about Standing Rock. The President had suspended Royer on January 8, and Captain Pierce assumed the full duties of Pine Ridge agent on January 12. He fell seriously ill, however, and was replaced a month later by Capt. Charles G. Penney.
Foreseeing immediately that divided responsibility at Rosebud and Cheyenne River Agencies might well produce chaos, Commissioner Morgan protested Miles' actions. But the general was ahead of him. On January 30, having returned to Chicago, he issued an amendment to General Order No. 2, assigning Lt. Col. W. F. Drum, commander of Fort Yates, to perform the duties at Standing Rock that Hurst and Lee were charged with at Cheyenne River and Rosebud.
McLaughlin blew up. "I have been in the Government service amongst the Indians for 20 consecutive years," he wrote to the Commissioner. "I am a bonded officer under which I am responsible to the Government and my Commission gives me full control of these Indians and the reservation under the orders of the proper Department, and in the absence of any just cause I protest against my authority being thus interfered with, as the unlimited powers regarding agency management given to officers of another Department will certainly lessen my influence as agent over the Indians and cannot be otherwise than detrimental to the service." He and Colonel Drum got along fine, but officers did get transferred. Drum could be pulled out of Fort Yates "and an officer specially selected by General Miles sent here to assume command, and any officer exercising the powers contemplated in the order, with General Miles' aggressive views in this respect, could not be otherwise than detrimental to the welfare of the Indians and the inevitable result will follow." Therefore, "in the interests of peace, in justice to myself, and to prevent serious trouble which I foresee will arise from conflict of authority, I most earnestly and respectfully request that the Indian Bureau take the proper steps to cause the revocation of the order of January 30, so far as relates to this Agency."
It was a telling argument, at least as applied to Standing Rock and its able agent, and Morgan seized the occasion to reopen the whole question. He understood the intention behind Paragraphs VI, VII, and VIII of General Order No. 2. The responsibilities they contemplated, he pointed out to Secretary Noble, "are not in any sense military functions but belong peculiarly and exclusively to the civil agents.... It must be, that General Miles in an excess of zeal has exceeded entirely his authority in thus attempting to take into his hands, to so large an extent, the control and oversight of these Indian agencies." The whole matter should be laid before the President.
Miles had his response ready when the query came from Washington. He recognized the perils of divided authority, he replied, and the solution was simple: turn the Indians over entirely to the control of the Army and thus "end the division of responsibility now existing." Dealing with General Miles, Schofield must have reflected, could be frustrating indeed. He did nothing, probably because he looked to an impending Army shake-up to solve the problem. By a reorganization announced on July 2, 1891, the military divisions were abolished and the department commanders made responsible directly to Washington. The Division of the Missouri became the Department of Missouri, and Miles lost his authority over the Departments of Dakota and the Platte, and thus over the Sioux. A military agent continued to administer Pine Ridge, under General Brooke's command, but the other agencies reverted entirely to civilian management.
Three issues remained unresolved. One was the complaint of the Crow Creek Indians on the Missouri River that their little reservation contained insufficient acreage in relation to population to carry out the allotment program. The Crook Commission had recommended cash compensation as the solution, and the Indian Bureau had repeatedly urged Congress to appropriate the necessary money. But the Indians at Crow Creek were progressive, peace loving, and incapable of making a big enough noise to be heard in the halls of Congress. They never received their compensation. The noisey Brulés farther west had more success.
Two related issues concerned the Brulés. One was the petition of part of the Lower Brulés, who had gone down to Rosebud in the summer of 1890, to be transferred to the Rosebud rolls and permitted to live with the Upper Brulés. The other was the petition of Lip's Brulés (Wazhazhas) at Pine Ridge to be transferred to the Pine Ridge rolls and permitted to live with the Oglalas. The latter were being held and fed by the Army as prisoners of war pending a settlement, and were giving their military keepers a rough time.
By the Indian Appropriation Act of March 3, 1891, Congress appropriated $6,000 to finance negotiation of the Brulé difficulties. A commission consisting of Charles E. Pearce of St. Louis, A. R. Appleman of Columbus, Ohio, and George H. Harries of Washington, D.C., was formed to conduct the negotiations. Only Harries, who had covered the Pine Ridge campaign for the Washington _Evening Star_ , knew much about Indians. The Pearce Commission visited Pine Ridge in June 1891 and quickly found that the only acceptable solution to the problem of the Wazhazhas was to transfer them to Pine Ridge, for they vowed to fight rather than go back to Rosebud. The Oglalas were willing, and more than three-fourths of the adult males signed an agreement to the transfer. A number of Indians from other agencies were also at Pine Ridge and refused to go home, so the agreement embraced them, too. The total number transferred was 811 —635 from Rosebud, 77 from Cheyenne River, 92 from Standing Rock, and 7 from Lower Brulé.
Negotiations at Rosebud went less smoothly. Although the Upper Brulés were perfectly willing to receive the 530 Lower Brulés who wished to move to Rosebud, they conditioned their formal agreement upon a series of unrelated and unacceptable demands (e.g. moving the Pine Ridge boundary westward to Pass Creek, a proposition the Oglalas had already refused to entertain). The commission had to disband, therefore, without disposing of this matter. The obstinance of the Rosebud chiefs brought into the open the real force behind the desire of the Lower Brulés to move. Several Indians and half-breeds on the Lower Brulé Reservation had been working assiduously to persuade all the Lower Brulés to move, promising that at Rosebud they could forget about farming and live a carefree life. These champions of the old order, however, could not resist boasting that they were being paid for their efforts by Senator R. F. Pettigrew, who in turn was working on behalf of cattlemen who wanted the Lower Brulé Reservation thrown open to whites. The design became clear in April 1892, when Senator Pettigrew introduced legislation in the Senate to open Lower Brulé even though three-fourths of the Lower Brulé Indians had refused to sign a cession agreement. He pushed his bill through the Committee on Indian Affairs, and only the vigorous opposition of the Indian Rights Association prevented him from slipping it through the full Senate.
Among the Sioux, the Ghost Dance religion had been dealt a shattering blow. Wounded Knee demonstrated that Ghost Shirts would not, as the apostles had promised, turn the bullets of the white man. The Government had moved to restore ration issues to former levels and to carry out the other recommendations of the Crook Commission, thus alleviating much of the distress that had made the religion so appealing. And Kicking Bear and Short Bull, apostles of the religion, had been removed from the reservation. Throughout the late winter and early spring of 1891, the Army remained alert for signs of trouble. There was some basis for concern. Travelers among the outlying settlements, especially on the Pine Ridge Reservation, reported that the Indians were restless and seemingly making ready for an outbreak in the spring, the time originally prophesied for the millennium. But spring came and went without any difficulty, and gradually the Sioux discarded the religion that had promised so much.
The story was similar elsewhere. When the millennium failed to come, the other plains tribes either gave up the religion or merged it, shorn of the more spectacular features, with the rest of their religious beliefs. Until his death in 1932, Wovoka lived quietly among his people, the Paiutes, who continued to call him "Our Father." "Had Wovoka's religion a timelessness and a staying quality," concluded his biographer, "Sitting Bull and the dead of the Wounded Knee Massacre would have risen as its saints. But the Messiah himself, in setting positive dates for the great millennium, had signed a death warrant for the faith."
Religion had failed to restore the old life. For the Indians of the West, there was now no choice but to submit to the new life.
## _Bibliography_
### 1. MANUSCRIPT MATERIAL
McCormick, Maj. L. S., "Wounded Knee and Drexel Mission Fights," December 1904, in E. S. Luce Seventh Cavalry Collection. McCormick observed the two battles in which the Seventh Cavalry participated from the vantage of regimental adjutant. His military bias detracts only slightly from the value of his detailed account.
_National Archives_. All correspondence cited in the footnotes without source identification is in the National Archives. Consulted were Record Group (RG) 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; RG 48, Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior; RG 107, Records of the Office of the Secretary of War; RG 94, Records of the Adjutant General's Office; and RG 98, Records of United States Army Commands. Especially valuable were the four drawers of Special Case 188, RG 75, containing Indian Bureau correspondence relating specifically to the Ghost Dance troubles; the transcript of testimony of the Wounded Knee court of inquiry; General Miles' Letters-Sent Field Book; the field messages from Carr and Brooke to Miles during the Pine Ridge campaign; and the reports of Inspector General Kent's investigations into the escape of Big Foot and the Drexel Mission fight. James Mooney used some of these records in writing his _Ghost-Dance_ , but neither he nor any subsequent student systematically exploited the official documents in depth. They are the principal body of sources shaping the narrative and interpretations of this book.
_Nebraska State Historical Society_. The Judge Eli S. Ricker Collection consists of interviews with many actors in the history of the Sioux from about 1850 until the close of the century, recorded in pencil on ruled tablets. The largest share pertains to the Ghost Dance, for it was a comparatively recent event when Ricker pursued his investigations, and many participants were still living. Especially useful were the interviews with mixed-blood participants. Having lived with the Sioux and speaking their language, these men understood what was happening on the Indian side and, unlike their full-blood kinsmen, could relate it in terms that make sense to the white student. To anyone who has dealt very extensively with Indian testimony, their accounts are refreshingly coherent. Too, Judge Ricker was an intelligent, capable interviewer who could establish rapport with his subjects and knew which questions to ask. Even so, there is much fantasy in the Ricker interviews, and they must be carefully checked against contemporary documents and balanced against probabilities.
Order of Indian Wars, American Military Institute, Washington, D.C. Miscellaneous files.
Rhodes, Maj. Gen. Charles D., "Diary of the Brule-Sioux (Pine Ridge) Indian War," Manuscript, 1940, shelved in East Search Room, National Archives. Rhodes was a lieutenant in the 6th Cavalry in 1891. Although this regiment played a less active role in the campaign than the 7th and 9th, the diary contains some useful information.
### 2. GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS
Board of Indian Commissioners, _Annual Reports_ , 1885–95. This was a quasi-official body formed in 1869 as a feature of Grant's Peace Policy. By 1880 the Board had lost much of its influence, but its reports contain interesting commentary, generally reflecting the attitudes of the reform organizations, on the course of Indian policy.
Commissioner of Indian Affairs, _Annual Reports_ , 1880–92. The printed reports of the Commissioner reveal the policies pursued and advocated by Federal officials and also contain statistical data as well as the annual reports and other correspondence of the agents.
_Congressional Record_ , 51st Cong., 1st sess., Vol. 22.
Densmore, Frances, _Teton Sioux Music_ , Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 61, Washington, 1918. The author was one of the pioneer ethnologists to work among the Sioux. This study deals with cultural matters considerably broader than the title indicates and was valuable to this book chiefly for its material on the Sun Dance.
Dorsey, J. O., _A Study of Siouan Cults_ , 11th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1888–89, Washington, 1894. Another early ethnologist among the Sioux, Dorsey's study aids in understanding Sioux social organization.
Ewers, John C., _Teton Dakota Ethnology and History_ , Berkeley, National Park Service, 1938. An excellent synthesis, with emphasis on material culture, by an outstanding ethnologist. This is a mimeographed report prepared mainly for reference by museum planners.
Kappler, Charles J., comp. and ed., _Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties_.... Vol. 1–2: Senate Documents, 57th Cong., 1st sess., No. 452; Vol. 3: Senate Documents, 62d Cong., 2d sess., No. 719.
Mooney, James, _The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890_ , 14th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1892–93, Pt. II, Washington, 1896. This classic study has been evaluated in the text.
Otis, D. S., "History of the Allotment Policy," _Readjustment of Indian Affairs_ , Hearings before the Committee on Indian Affairs, House of Representatives, 73d Cong., 2d sess., on H. R. 7902.
Richardson, James D., _A Compilation of Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897_ , 9 vols. Washington, 1898.
Royce, Charles C., comp., _Indian Land Cessions in the United States_ , 18th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1896–97, Washington, 1899. An exhaustive, definitive work indispensable for any student of Indian history.
Secretary of War, _Annual Reports_ , 1890–92. The report for 1891 contains many official reports of the military activities on the Sioux reservations but omits some key documents.
Senate Documents, 50th Cong., 2d sess., No. 17. Correspondence and transcript of councils of the Sioux Commission of 1888.
Senate Documents, 51st Cong., 1st sess., No. 51. Correspondence and transcript of councils of the Sioux Commission of 1889.
Swanton, John R., _The Indian Tribes of North America_ , Bureau of Ethnology Bulletin 145, Washington, 1952. Helpful reference study of linguistic and tribal classifications.
_U.S. Statutes at Large_ , 51st Cong. (1889–91), Vol. 26.
War Department, _General Orders and Circulars_ , 1890–91.
War Department, _Special Orders_ , 1890–91.
### 3. NEWSPAPERS. 1890–91
_Chicago Tribune_
_Nebraska State Journal_ (Lincoln)
_New York Herald_
Omaha _Daily Bee_
_Sioux City Journal_
_Sioux Falls Argus-Leader_
Washington _Evening Star_
### 4. PERIODICALS AND ARTICLES
_Army and Navy Journal_ , 1890–91.
Arnold, Lt. Col. Frazer, "Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee," _Cavalry Journal, 43_ (1934), 18–20. Reproduces Lieutenant Mann's letter to his brother written just after Wounded Knee, a vital document for understanding certain phases of the engagement.
Bourke, John G., "The Indian Messiah," _Nation_ (Dec. 4, 1890), pp. 439–40.
Brininstool, E. A., "Buffaloing Buffalo Bill," _Hunter-Trader-Trapper_ (April 1938). Popular account of Cody's mission to arrest Sitting Bull.
Colby, Brig. Gen. L. W., "The Sioux Indian War of 1890-'91," _Transactions and Reports of the Nebraska State Historical Society, 3_ (1892), 144–90. Colby commanded the Nebraska militia in the Sioux campaign. This article is detailed and useful but inaccurate in many respects. It includes several letters of importance.
Colby, Brig. Gen. L. W., "Wanagi Olowan Kin (The Ghost Songs of the Dakotas)," _Proceedings and Collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society, 1_ , 2d ser. (1895), 131–50. Reproduces translations of ghost songs.
Dawes, Henry L., "Have We Failed the Indian?" _Atlantic Monthly, 84_ (1899), 280. Senator Dawes questions the means of executing the Dawes Severalty Act.
Dougherty, Capt. W. E., "The Recent Messiah Craze," _Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, 12_ (1891), 576–78. Observations of an infantry officer at Pine Ridge during the outbreak.
Eastman, Elaine Goodale, "The Ghost Dance War and Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890–91," _Nebraska History, 26_ (1945), 26–42. Elaine Goodale taught school at Pine Ridge during the Ghost Dance troubles and later married the agency physician, Dr. Charles Eastman, a Santee Sioux. This article, which includes excerpts from her diary, is a valuable source despite its antimilitary tone.
Fechet, Maj. E. G., "The True Story of the Death of Sitting Bull," _Proceedings and Collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society_ , 2d ser. _2_ (1898), 179–89. Reprinted from _Cosmopolitan, 20_ (1896), 493–501. A slightly different version appears in _South Dakota Historical Collections, 4_ (1908), 493–501. Fechet led the troops in the Grand River affair. His lengthy account is detailed and accurate and indispensable to any account of the killing of Sitting Bull.
Finley, Mrs. James A., "The Messiah Superstition," _Journal of American Folk-Lore, 4_ (1891), 66–68. Reprinted from _Essex County Mercury_ (Salem, Mass.), Nov. 26, 1890. Eyewitness account of a Ghost Dance at Pine Ridge by the wife of the Wounded Knee postmaster.
Fitzgerald, Sister Mary Clement, "Bishop Marty and His Sioux Missions," _South Dakota Historical Collections, 20_ (1940), 525–58.
_Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper_ , 1890–91.
Frink, Maurice M., "Died Here Innocent," _Outing_ (February 1915), 549–54. Interesting article based on personal experience at Pine Ridge when Wounded Knee was still fresh in the minds of survivors.
Gibbon, Brig. Gen. John, "Transfer of Indian Bureau to War Department," _American Catholic Quarterly Review, 19_ (1894), 244–59. Plea by a veteran Indian fighter for military responsibility for Indian affairs.
Godfrey, Maj. E. S., "Cavalry Fire Discipline," _Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, 19_ (1896), 259. A technical article illustrated with personal experiences from Wounded Knee and other battles.
Goldfrank, Esther S., "Historic Change and Social Character: A Study of the Teton Dakota," _American Anthropologist, 45_ (1943), 67–83.
Green, Charles L., "The Indian Reservation System of the Dakotas to 1889," _South Dakota Historical Collections, 14_ (1928), 307–415. An excellent survey.
Green, Lt. L. D., "The Army and the Indian," _Harper's Weekly, 38_ (May 19, 1894), 471. Army officers make good Indian agents and Indians benefit from serving in the Army.
Gresham, Lt. John C., "The Story of Wounded Knee," _Harper'sWeekly, 35_ (Feb. 7, 1891), 106–07. Good firsthand account by a participant.
Grinnell, George Bird, "Account of the Northern Cheyenne concerning the Messiah Superstition," _Journal of American Folk-Lore, 4_ (1891), 62–67. Expert analysis by one of the best interpreters of Indian life and history.
_Harper's Weekly_ , 1890–91.
Hawthorne, Lt. Harry L., "The Sioux Campaign of 1890–91," _Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, 19_ (1896), 185–87. Hawthorne and Lt. W. P. Richardson (see below) carried on a warm but inconclusive debate in this periodical over the management of the Wounded Knee engagement.
_Illustrated American_ , 1890–91.
Kelley, W. F., "The Indian Troubles and the Battle of Wounded Knee," _Transactions and Reports of the Nebraska State Historical Society, 4_ (1892), 30–50. Excellent article by a newspaper reporter who covered the Pine Ridge campaign and participated in the battle of Wounded Knee.
Mattes, Merrill J., "The Enigma of Wounded Knee," _Plains Anthropologist_ , 5 (1960), 1–11. Good analysis of published evidence.
Mattison, Ray H., "The Indian Reservation System on the Upper Missouri, 1865–1890," _Nebraska History, 36_ (1955), 141–72. Good survey.
Maus, Capt. Marion P., "The New Indian Messiah," _Harper's Weekly, 34_ (Dec. 6, 1890), 944. A member of Miles' staff, Maus observed the Ghost Dance in October 1890 when the general visited Pine Ridge as a member of the Northern Cheyenne Commission.
Mekeel, Scudder, "A Short History of the Teton-Dakota," _North Dakota Historical Quarterly, 10_ (1943), 137–205. Good survey.
Miles, Maj. Gen. Nelson A., "The Future of the Indian Question," _North American Review, 152_ (1891), 1–11. A plea for his solution to the Indian question.
Mooney, James, "The Indian Ghost Dance," _Collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society, 16_ (1911), 168–86. In this speech before the Nebraska State Historical Society, Mooney approached the topic in a more popular vein than in the Bureau of American Ethnology publication.
Moorehead, Warren K., "The Indian Messiah and the Ghost Dance," _American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal, 12_ (1891), 161–67. An anthropologist's personal observations of the Sioux Ghost Dance.
Parker, Mrs. Z. A., "Ghost Dance at Pine Ridge," _Journal of American Folk-Lore, 4_ (1891), 160–62. Reprinted from New York _Evening Post_ , April 18, 1891. Eyewitness account of a Ghost Dance.
Philip, George, "James (Scotty) Philip," _South Dakota Historical Collections, 20_ (1940), 358–406. Philip ranched in the ceded tract in 1890 and was visited by some Ghost Dancers.
Phillips, David Graham, "The Sioux Chiefs before the Secretary," _Harper's Weekly, 35_ (Feb. 21, 1891), 142.
Phister, Lt. N. P., "The Indian Messiah," _American Anthropologist_ , o.s. _4_ (1891), 105–08. Account of the origins of the Ghost Dance religion among the Paiutes.
Remington, Frederic, "Chasing a Major-General," _Harper's Weekly, 34_ (Dec. 6, 1890), 946–47. Remington accompanied Miles and the Northern Cheyenne Commission.
Remington, Frederic, "The Art of War and Newspaper Men," _Harper's Weekly, 34_ (Dec. 6, 1890), 947.
Remington, Frederic, "Indians as Irregular Cavalry," _Harper's Weekly, 34_ (Dec. 27, 1890), 1004–06.
Remington, Frederic, "The Sioux Outbreak in South Dakota," _Harper's Weekly, 35_ (Jan. 24, 1891), 57–62. Excellent reportorial coverage of the Pine Ridge campaign.
Remington, Frederic, "Lieutenant Casey's Last Scout," _Harper's Weekly_ , 35 (Jan. 31, 1891), 85–91.
Richardson, Lt. W. P., "Some Observations upon the Sioux Campaign of 1890–91," _Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, 18_ (1896), 512–31. See Hawthorne, H. L.
Robinson, Doane, "Some Sidelights on the Character of Sitting Bull," _Collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society, 16_ (1911), 187–92.
Robinson, Doane, "The Education of Redcloud," _South Dakota Historical Collections, 12_ (1924), 156–78. Details the conflict between Red Cloud and Agent McGillycuddy over organization of the Indian police force at Pine Ridge.
Schwatka, Lt. Frederick, "The Sun-Dance of the Sioux," _Century Magazine, 39_ (1890), 753–59. Excellent eyewitness account of the last Sioux Sun Dance.
Scott, Brig. Gen. E. D., "Wounded Knee, a Look at the Record," _Field Artillery Journal, 24_ (1939), 5–24. Analysis of the Wounded Knee court of inquiry records with the aim of vindicating the Army.
Seymour, Charles G., "The Sioux Rebellion, the Final Review," _Harper's Weekly_ , 35 (Feb. 7, 1891), 106.
Smith, Marian W., "The War Complex of the Plains Indians," _Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 78_ (1938), 425–64.
Sword, George, "The Story of the Ghost Dance," transl. Emma Sickels, _Folk-Lorist, 1_ (1892-93), 28–31. Sword was the intelligent and able captain of the Pine Ridge police. This is an important source and also contains translations of some ghost songs.
Thayer, James B., "A People without Law," _Atlantic Monthly, 48_ (1891), 540–51, 676–87. Plea for extension of U.S. law to the Indians.
Traub, Capt. Peter E., "The First Act of the Last Sioux Campaign," _Journal of the United States Cavalry Association, 15_ (1905), 872–79. Traub was at Fort Yates in 1890 and here deals with the means by which Buffalo Bill's attempt to arrest Sitting Bull was thwarted.
Voget, Fred W., "The American Indian in Transition: Reformation and Accommodation," _American Anthropologist, 58_ (1956), 249–63. Discussion of nativistic religious movements produced by culture conflict.
Walker, J. R., "The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota," _Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 16_ , Pt. 2 (1917). Although modified in some respects by later investigations, this remains the most exhaustive and detailed study of Oglala religion.
Watson, Elmo Scott, "The Last Indian War, 1890–91—A Study of Newspaper Jingoism," _Journalism Quarterly, 20_ (1943), 205–19. Excellent scholarly study by a leading journalistic historian.
Watson, Elmo Scott, "Pine Ridge, 1890–91," _Westerners Brand Book_ (Denver, 1946), pp. 3–4. List of prominent people at Pine Ridge during the Ghost Dance trouble.
Watson, Julia S., "A Sketch of George H. Harries, Reporter of Wounded Knee," _New York Westerners Brand Book_ , 3 (1956), 73–76.
Wells, Philip F., "Ninety-six Years Among the Indians of the Northwest," _North Dakota History, 15_ (1948), 265–312. Wells' contemporary testimony is far more valuable than this reminiscence.
Welsh, Herbert, "The Indian Question, Past and Present," _New England Magazine, 2_ (1890), 257–66. Plea for the Indian policies advocated by the Indian Rights Association, of which Welsh was the influential corresponding secretary.
Welsh, Herbert, "The Meaning of the Dakota Outbreak," _Scribner's Magazine, 9_ (1891), 429–52. Again, Welsh presents the Sioux troubles as the price of not following policies championed by the reform groups.
Wilson, G., "The Sioux War," _Nation_ , 52 (1891), 29–30.
Wissler, Clark, "Societies and Ceremonial Associations of the Oglala Division of the Teton-Dakota," _Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 11_ , Pt. 2 (1916). The most valuable work on Oglala social organization.
Woodruff, K. Brent, "The Episcopal Mission to the Dakotas," _South Dakota Historical Collections, 20_ (1940), 525–58.
### 5. BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS
Alexander, Hartley B., _The World's Rim_ (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1933). Contains a perceptive if impressionistic treatment of the Ghost Dance against the backdrop of earlier movements of similar character.
Bailey, Paul, _Wovoka, the Indian Messiah_ (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1957). Although treating the Ghost Dance among the Sioux briefly and somewhat superficially, this biography of the founder of the religion is very well done and will continue to serve as the basic source.
Beyer, W. F., and Keydel, O. F., eds., _Deeds of Valor_ (Detroit, 1907), Vol. 2. Contains Cpl. Paul Weinert's graphic story of his experiences at Wounded Knee.
Bland, Thomas A., _A Brief History of the Late Military Invasion of the Home of the Sioux_ (Washington, National Indian Defense Association, 1891). This partisan defense of the Sioux in the Ghost Dance troubles contains some very valuable letters and interviews.
Bourke, John G., _On the Border with Crook_ (New York, 1891). This classic of frontier history by General Crook's aide includes a few pages dealing with the general's role in the land cession of 1889.
Boyd, James P., _Recent Indian Wars_ (Philadelphia, 1891). This is valuable chiefly as a compilation of press dispatches from Pine Ridge during the Ghost Dance outbreak.
Brady, Cyrus T., _Indian Fights and Fighters_ (New York, 1904). Contains an appendix recounting Maj. Guy V. Henry's adventures in the Pine Ridge campaign.
Burdick, Usher L., ed., _My Friend the Indian, or Three Heretofore Unpublished Chapters of the Book Published under the Title of My Friend the Indian, by Major James McLaughlin_ (Baltimore: Proof Press, 1936). McLaughlin's publishers rejected his final three chapters, containing much of interest to the story of the Ghost Dance at Standing Rock, and they were published in this pamphlet.
Campbell, Walter S. See Vestal, Stanley.
Carter, Lt. Col. W. H., _From Yorktown to Santiago with the Sixth U.S. Cavalry_ (Baltimore, 1900). Carter was an officer of the 6th in the Pine Ridge campaign. His history of the regiment contains a graphic chapter on the role of this unit in the campaign.
Cook, James H., _Fifty Years on the Old Frontier_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923). A scout at Pine Ridge, Cook was a perceptive, literate observer who understood both white and Indian motivations.
Crook, George. See Schmitt, Martin F.
DeBarthe, Joe, _Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard_ (Buffalo, Wyo., n.d.), 2d ed. ed. E. I. Stewart (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958). Grouard was one of the great frontier scouts, but his contribution regarding the Pine Ridge outbreak, in which he was a scout, is disappointing.
Dewey, M. E., _Historical Sketch of the Formation and Achievements of the Women's National Indian Association_ (n.p., 1900).
Eastman, Charles A., _From Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian_ (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1920). Most of Eastman's writings on Indian history have been seriously questioned, but his account of the Ghost Dance at Pine Ridge, where he was agency physician, is an outstanding source generally corroborated by other evidence.
Eastman, Elaine Goodale, _Pratt, the Red Man's Moses_ (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1935). The standard biography of the founder of Carlisle Indian School portrays Pratt in the conventional image of the reform groups of the 1880s, in which the Sioux would hardly have concurred. A pioneer in Indian education herself, Mrs. Eastman questions none of the assumptions on which the education program was founded.
Farrow, Edward S., _Farrow's Military Encyclopedia: A Dictionary of Military Knowledge_ (3 vols., New York, 1885).
Fiske, Frank Bennett, _Life and Death of Sitting Bull_ (Fort Yates, N.D.: Pioneer-Arrow Press, 1933). Reared at Standing Rock, Fiske as a youth observed the events of 1890 and later obtained much information from participants. This book is a valuable source for the Standing Rock story.
Gessner, Robert, _Massacre: A Survey of Today's American Indian_ (New York: Farrar & Co., 1931). The title is misleading. This is an intensely antimilitary and grossly inaccurate history of Wounded Knee that created a sensation when it was published.
Hodge, Frederick Webb., ed., _Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico_ (2 vols. Washington, 1912). Still the richest storehouse of knowledge about the Indian.
Howe, M. A. DeWolfe, _The Life and Labors of Bishop Hare_ (New York, 1911). Contains important material on the Episcopal missionary effort among the Sioux.
Hyde, George E., _Red Clouds' Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians_ (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1937; 2d ed. 1957). Hyde is one of the few historians who has mastered the techniques of exploiting Indian evidence, and, despite some faults, his Sioux trilogy will long stand as an example of Indian history at its best.
Hyde, George E., _A Sioux Chronicle_ (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956). This deals with the first decade of the reservation period, 1878–91.
Hyde, George E., _Spotted Tail's Folk: A History of the Brulé Sioux_ (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961).
Indian Rights Association, _Brief Statement of the Nature and Purpose of the Indian Rights Association, with a Summary of Its Work for the Year 1892_ (Philadelphia, 1893).
Indian Rights Association, _Protest by the Executive Committee of the Indian Rights Association against the Passage of Senator Pettigrew's Bill for the Removal of the Lower Brule Indians to the Rosebud Reserve_ (Philadelphia, 1893).
Indian Rights Association, _Annual Reports_ , 1886–93. These are immensely valuable not only for revealing the conventional reform theories of the time but also for the many factual reports of the IRA investigators, who kept close watch on the activities at the Indian agencies.
Johnston, Sister Mary Antonio, _Federal Relations with the Great Sioux Indians of South Dakota, 1887–1933, with Particular Reference to Land Policy under the Dawes Act_ (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1948). Despite bad organization and excessive footnoting, this is a basic study.
LaFarge, Oliver, ed., _The Changing Indian_ (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1942). Contributions by experts in Indian matters on the many problems confronted by the Indian as a result of conquest, official policy, and culture conflict.
Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples, _Annual Reports_ , 1885–95. The reform groups met each year at Lake Mohonk, N.Y., to formulate policies to press upon Congress and the Government. The annual reports reveal reform philosophies and activities.
Leupp, Francis E., _Civil Service Reform Essential to a Successful Indian Administration_ (Philadelphia, Indian Rights Association, 1895). Leupp, a realistic reformer, later became Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
Lindquist, G. E., _The Red Man in the United States_ (New York: Doran, 1923).
Lowie, Robert H., _Primitive Religion_ (New York: Boni and Live-right, 1924).
McGillycuddy, Julia B., _McGillycuddy: Agent_ (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1941). Laudatory biography of the stormy agent at Pine Ridge; generally good despite inaccuracies.
MacGregor, Gordon, _Warriors without Weapons: A Study of the Society and Personality Development of the Pine Ridge Sioux_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946). A team of field investigators gathered data for this excellent study of the impact of white ways upon the Sioux.
McGregor, James H., _The Wounded Knee Massacre from the Viewpoint of the Sioux_ (Minneapolis: Lund Press, 1940). Although badly partisan and disorganized, this book contains many accounts by Indian participants. Few, however, are coherent enough to be useful.
McLaughlin, James, _My Friend the Indian_ (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1910). See also Burdick, Usher L. As well as presenting the point of view of the Standing Rock agent, this autobiography sets forth much important detail. Indispensable for understanding the death of Sitting Bull.
Miller, David H., _Ghost Dance_ (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1959). Uncritical reliance on Indian evidence, mostly obtained by the author himself, and superficial investigation of standard sources make this popular account of doubtful value.
Moorehead, Warren K., _The American Indian in the United States, 1850–1914_ (Andover, Mass.: Andover Press, 1914). The author, an anthropologist, was at Pine Ridge in 1890–91.
Morgan, Thomas J., _The Present Phase of the Indian Question_ , Boston Indian Citizenship Committee, Pub. 10 (Boston, 1891). Defense of Morgan's policies as Indian Commissioner.
Neihardt, John G., _Black Elk Speaks: Being a Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux_ (New York: Morrow, 1932). Reminiscence of a Pine Ridge Sioux, which is factually weak.
Neihardt, John G., _Song of the Messiah: A Cycle of the West_ (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1949). Neihardt sensitively catches the mood of the new religion as felt by the Sioux.
Priest, Loring B., _Uncle Sam's Stepchildren: The Reformation of the Indian Policy, 1865–1887_ (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1942). The author of this standard history of Federal Indian policy tends in general to accept as desirable the goals toward which the reformers of the period were working, and also the means they advocated.
Robinson, Doane, _A History of the Dakota or Sioux Indians_ (2d. ed. Minneapolis: Ross and Haines, 1956). Although poorly written, this pioneering history of the Sioux contains considerable information not found elsewhere.
Rodenbough, Theo. F., ed. _The Army of the United States_ (New York, 1896).
Roosevelt, Theodore, _Report of the Hon. Theodore Roosevelt Made to the United States Civil Service Commission, upon a Visit to Certain Indian Reservations and Indian Schools in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas_ (Philadelphia, Indian Rights Association, 1893).
Russell, Don, _The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill_ (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960). The definitive biography of the legendary scout.
Schell, Herbert S., _History of South Dakota_ (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961).
Schofield, Gen. John M., _Forty-six Years in the Army_ (New York, 1897).
Schmeckebier, Laurence F., _The Office of Indian Affairs: Its History, Activities and Organization_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1927). A thorough study of the Indian Bureau, past and present. The history of Indian policy is concise and accurate.
Schmitt, Martin F., ed., _General George Crook, His Autobiography_ (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1946). The excerpts from Crook's diary reveal much about the techniques by which the land agreement of 1889 was sold to the Sioux.
Secoy, Frank R., _Changing Military Patterns on the Great Plains_ , American Ethnological Society, _Monographs_ , 21 (New York, 1953).
Seymour, Flora Warren, _Indian Agents of the Old Frontier_ (New York: Appleton-Century, 1941). Romanticized sketches of selected agents.
Seymour, Flora Warren, _The Story of the Sioux_ (p.p. Girard, Kans., 1924). Popular and romanticized history.
Slattery, Charles L., _Felix Reville Brunot, 1820–1898_ (New York, 1901). Laudatory biography of one of the leading reformers.
Smith, DeCost, _Red Indian Experiences_ (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949).
Spindler, Will H., _Tragedy Strikes at Wounded Knee_ (n.p., 1955).
Standing Bear, Luther, _My People the Sioux_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1928). Another Indian reminiscence, interesting mainly for point of view.
Textor, Lucy, _Official Relations between the United States and the Sioux Indians_ (Palo Alto, 1896). Standard authority.
Vestal, Stanley, ed., _New Sources of Indian History, 1850–1891_ (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1934). Reproduces unofficial documents that are vital to any study of the Sioux troubles of 1890–91.
Vestal, Stanley, _Sitting Bull: Champion of the Sioux_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932; 2d ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957). Writing under the pseudonym of Stanley Vestal, Walter S. Campbell gathered a great quantity of firsthand Indian testimony and wove it into several vividly written works of Sioux history. His work is significant, but must always be read in light of his uncritical reliance upon Indian evidence and uniform bias toward the Indian viewpoint.
Vestal, Stanley, _Warpath and Council Fire_ (New York: Random House, 1948).
Welsh, Herbert, _The Appointment of a First-Rate Indian Agent by the New Administration_ (Philadelphia, Indian Rights Association, 1893).
Welsh, Herbert, _Civilization among the Sioux Indians: Report ofa Visit to Some of the Sioux Reservations of South Dakota and Nebraska_ (Philadelphia, Indian Rights Association, 1893).
Welsh, Herbert, _The Murrain of Spoils in the Indian Service_ (Baltimore, National Civil Service Reform League, 1898).
Welsh, Herbert, _How to Bring the Indian to Citizenship and Citizenship to the Indian_ (Philadelphia, Indian Rights Association, 1892).
Welsh, Herbert, _Allotment of Lands: Defense of the Dawes Indian Severalty Bill_ (Philadelphia, Indian Rights Association, 1887).
Welsh, Herbert, _A Dangerous Assault upon the Integrity of the Civil Service Law in the Indian Service_ (Philadelphia, Indian Rights Association, 1893).
Wissler, Clark, _Indian Cavalcade, or Life on the Old-Time Indian Reservations_ (New York: Sheridan House, 1938). Wissler's residence at Pine Ridge in the early years of the twentieth century gave him an insight into the institutions of the reservation system and the process by which they broke down the old Indian life. Although presented in a popular vein, this book is invaluable to the student of the reservation system.
Wissler, Clark, _North American Indians of the Plains_ (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1934; 2d ed. 1948). Standard authority.
## _Index_
Adam, Maj. Emil, –91
Afraid-of-Bear. _See_ Bull Head
Agreement of _1876_ , , n., , , ; map,
Akicita, –10, ,
Alkali Creek,
Allen, Charles W., ; at Wounded Knee, , n.
Alpena, S.D.,
American Historical Association, vii
American Horse, , , , , –09; in Washington,
American Horse Creek,
Angell, Henry,
Apache Indians,
Appleman, A. R., –84
Arapaho Indians, , , ,
Arizona, ,
Arkansas River,
_Army and Navy Journal_ ,
Arnold, Lt. Col. A. K.,
Arnold, Lucy,
Artillery at Wounded Knee. _See_ Hotchkiss Gún
Asay, James, , ,
Bache, Lt. Col. Dallas,
Bad River, ,
Badlands, , , ; Big Foot in, –91
Badlands National Monument, S.D.,
Badlands Wall, –91
Bailey, Paul, n.
Baldwin, Capt. Frank D., n., –49
Bannock Indians, ,
Battle Creek,
Battle Creek Draw, skirmish at,
Bear Bone,
Bear Butte, S.D., , ,
Bear-Comes-and-Lies,
Bear-Lying-Down, –58
Beard, Dewey, ; at Wounded Knee, , , , –22
"Bear's Coat," _See_ Miles
Belle Fourche River, , , , ,
Belt, Actg. CIA Robert V., , , –05, –11, , –23, , ,
Benoit, Felix, , –84
Big-Bad-Horse,
Big Bat. _See_ Pourier
Big Foot, –3, , , –82, –97, , –42, , , ; and Ghost Dance, –33; sketch, ; invited to Pine Ridge, ; moves down Cheyenne River, , –79; apprehended by Sumner, –81; escape, –86; search for, –90, –93; flight of, –91, –94; surrender, –99; at Wounded Knee, –08; death,
Big Foot Pass, S.D.,
Big Foot Spring. _See_ Cedar Spring
Big Road, , , , , , , , , , , ; flight from Pine Ridge, ,
Big Turkey, –38
Bismarck, N.D., , ,
Bisonette, Joseph,
Black Bird,
Black Coyote,
Black Fox,
Black Hills, , , , , , , , , , , , , ; map, , –71
Black Moon,
Black Pipe Creek,
Blackburn, T. W.,
Blackfeet Sioux. _See_ Sioux Indians, Blackfeet
Bland, T. A., –68,
Bloomer, Pvt. A. L.,
Blotaunka,
Blue Horse, ,
Blue Whirlwind,
Bourke, Capt. John G., –16
Bozeman Trail, –41,
Brave Thunder,
Brechemin, Col. Louis, n.
Brewer, Lt. Edwin P.,
Brininstool, Earl A., n.
Broken Arm, , , –58
Brooke, Brig. Gen. John R., , , , , , , –20, , , , , , , , , , –33, , , , , , , , , , ; peace efforts, –45, , , –92; sends Jutz; to Stronghold, ; conference with chiefs, –40; plan for attacking Stronghold, –45; orders Forsyth to Wounded Knee, –97; Wounded Knee investigation, ; commands White River line, , ; tightens line, –60
Brooks, Lt. E. C.,
Brulé Sioux. _See_ Sioux Indians, Brulé
Buffalo, , –23, ,
Buffalo Bill. _See_ Cody, William F.
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, , , , –72
Bull Creek, ,
Bull Dog,
Bull Eagle,
Bull Ghost, ,
Bull Head, Lt. Henry, , , ; and arrest of Sitting Bull, –66; shot, , ; death, –65
Bureau of Indian Affairs. _See_ U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs
Butler, Maj. Edmund,
California, ,
Camp Cheyenne, S.D., , , , , , , , ,
Camp Robinson, Neb., –19
Campbell, QM Sgt. Charles,
Campbell, Walter S. _See_ Vestal, Stanley
Canada, , n., ,
Cannonball River, ,
Capron, Capt. Allyn, , , , –02, , ; at Wounded Knee, –16, –22,
Carey, Blacksmith,
Carignan, John M., , –25; spy for McLaughlin, –51, n.; and arrest of Sitting Bull, –58
Carlisle Indian School, Pa., , , , ,
Carr, Col. Eugene A., , , , , , , ; search for Big Foot, –90; skirmish on White River, ; at final review,
Carroll, Maj. Henry,
Casey, Lt. Edward W., , ; murdered, –58; trial of murderer, –66
Catch-the-Bear, ; death, –60
Catholic Church, , , , , ,
Catholic Mission. _See_ Drexel Mission
Cavanaugh, James,
Cedar Spring, S.D.,
Cemetery Hill, , , , , , , ,
Census, –55, , ,
Chadron, Neb., , ,
Chadron _Democrat_ ,
Chadwick, G. W.,
Chapman, A. L, n.
Charging First,
Chased-by-Bears,
Chasing Crane,
Chasing Crow,
Chasing Hawk,
Chaska,
Chatka, Lt., –98
Cherry Creek, , , , , , ; dances on, –32
Cheyenne City, S.D., , , ,
Cheyenne Indians, , , , –80, , , ; Little Chief's band moved to Mont., , n.
Cheyenne River, , , , , , –33, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Cheyenne River Agency and Reservation, S.D., , , , , , , , , , , , , –62, , , –82, , , , , , –33, , , –76, , , , , , ; map, , –71; introduction of Ghost Dance, , ; return of prisoners to, –73; military agent at, –81
Cheyenne Scouts, , , –58
_Chicago Tribune_ ,
Chieftainship, ; attack on, –30
Chilocco Indian School, Okla.,
Chippewa Indians,
Christianity, –34, –65, , ; and Ghost Dance religion,
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. _See_ Mormon Church
Circling Bear,
Circling Hawk,
Cisney, Insp. J. H., ,
Cleveland, Pres. Grover,
Cleveland, Rev. William J., ,
Cloud Horse,
Clown (Indian), –65
Cody, William F. (Buffalo Bill), , , ; attempted arrest of Sitting Bull, –26; signs chiefs in show, –72
Colby, Brig. Gen. L. W., ,
Colby, Marguerite,
Collins, Mary, –99,
Condorcanqui,
Congregational Church, , , , ,
Cook, Rev. Charles, , ,
Cook, James H., –36,
Cook, Agt. John,
Cooper, Sp. Agt. James A., ,
Corliss, Lt. A. W.,
Corwin, Sgt. Maj. Richard,
Cosgrove, George,
Court of Indian Offenses, –32
Craft, Fr. Francis M. J., –59, , , , ; at Wounded Knee, , , –15
Craven, Gus, –91,
Crazy Horse, –19,
Crazy Walking, Capt.,
Cressey, Will, –44,
Crook, Maj. Gen. George, –19, , , ; on Sioux Commission, –54; death, –59; differences with Miles, –29
Crook Commission. _See_ Sioux Commission of _1889_
Crow Creek Agency and Reservation, S.D., , , , , , , –83; map, , –71
Crow Dog, , n., , ,
Crow Foot, ; and death of Sitting Bull, –59; death, –61
Crow Indians, , , ,
Crow King, ,
Crow Woman,
Crowder, Lt. E. H.,
Culbertson, Andrew, –65, –67
Culbertson, Pete, –65, –67
Culbertson, Nelson, –65, –67
Cuny Table, S.D., –22
Custer, Lt. Col. George A., , , , , ,
Daly's Ranch, S.D., skirmish at, –44
Dawes, Sen. Henry L., ,
Dawes Act, , –43
Day, Col. H. M., , , ,
Deadwood, S.D.,
Deep Creek, , , ,
Densmore, Frances, ,
Department of Dakota, , ,
Department of the Platte, , , ,
Department of Texas,
Dion, Sam,
Division of the Missouri, , , , , ,
Dixon, Agt. A. P., ; suppresses Ghost Dance at Lower Brulé, –31
Donaldson, Lt. T. Q., , n.; at Wounded Knee, –18, ,
Dorchester, Dr. Daniel, n.
Drexel Mission, S.D., , , , , , ; battle at, –41; investigation of battle, –49
Drum, Lt. Col. William F., , , –26, , , , , , ; and plans for arrest of Sitting Bull, ; ordered to arrest Sitting Bull, ; and decision to arrest Sitting Bull, –56; military agent at Standing Rock,
Duff, Lt. R. J., , ,
Dunn, John, –84
Eagle Man, Sgt. John, , ,
Eagle Pipe, , ,
Earnest, Capt. C. A., n.
Eastman, Dr. Charles A., –3, , , ,
Eastman, Elaine G. _See_ Goodale
Edgerly, Capt. Winfield S., , ; at Wounded Knee, , –26
Edmunds, Newton, ,
Eighth Cavalry, , , , , , , ; at Grand River fight, –63
Eighth Infantry, , ,
Elk Creek, ,
Elk Horn, ,
Episcopal Church, , ,
Ewers, Capt. Ezra P., and Hump, –32; in charge of Pine Ridge prisoners, ; conducts Cheyennes to Mont., ; military agent at Tongue River,
Ewing, Asst. Surg. Charles B., ; at Wounded Knee, , ,
Farming program, –25, –29, , ,
Fast Thunder,
Fechet, Capt. E. G., , ; and fight at Grand River, –63,
Fellman, Pvt. Nathan,
Fetishes,
Few Tails, murder of, –65; trial of murderers, –67
Fifth Cavalry, ,
Finley, James A., ,
First Artillery, , , , –02
First Cavalry,
First Infantry, , , ,
Fiske, Frank, –65
Flat Iron,
Flying Horse, ,
Forest Grove Indian School, Oreg.,
Forsyth, Col. James W., , , , , , , n.; ordered to Wounded Knee, –97; sketch, ; at Wounded Knee, –28; at Drexel Mission, –41; investigation of, –49
Forts: Bennett, S.D., , , , –76, , , , , ; Buford, Mont., ; Hall, Ida., ; Keogh, Mont., , ; Laramie, Wyo., ; Leavenworth, Kans., ; Lincoln, N.D., ; McKinney, Wyo., ; Meade, S.D., , , , , , ; Niobrara, Neb., , , ; Omaha, Neb., ; Randall, S.D., , n., ; Riley, Kans., ; Robinson, Neb., ; Sheridan, ., ; Sidney, Neb., ; Snelling, Minn., ; Sully, S.D., , , , ; Wingate, N.M., ; Yates, N.D., , , , , , , , –66,
Fort Leavenworth Cavalry Squadron, , , ,
Foster, Charles, –51,
Fox, Andrew,
Freighting, –26
Fremont, Elkhorn, & Missouri Valley Railroad, , ,
Frog,
Fuller, Lt. Ezra B.,
Gall, , , , ; works against Ghost Dance,
Gallagher, Agt. Hugh D., , , –75, , , , , , n., ; attempt to break up Ghost Dance, –94
Garlington, Lt. Ernest A., , , ; wounded,
Gamier, Baptiste (Little Bat), , –95, , , , ; at Wounded Knee, ; at Drexel Mission, –40
"Garryowen,"
Gatling Gun, , , ,
General Allotment Act. _See_ Dawes Act
Genoa Indian School, Neb.,
Geronimo, n.
Getty, Lt. Robert N., ,
Ghost Dance, viii, , , , , , , n., , , , , , , ; description, –91; at Torn Belly's camp, –94; at Cherry Creek, –32; in Stronghold, –41; at Grand River, .;
MOVEMENT, , ; origins, –67; and Mormonism, –65; causes, ; introduced at Pine Ridge, –75, , ; introduced at Rosebud, ; introduced at Cheyenne River, –97; introduced at Standing Rock, –98; suppression at Lower Brulé, –31; plans to suppress at Standing Rock, ; passim; and Big Foot, .;
RELIGION, viii, , , , , , , , –85; origins, –67; and Mormonism, –65; content, –71; and Christianity, ; antecedents, –71; Sioux version, –74.;
SONGS, , , –89,
Ghost Shirt, , n., –87, , , , , , ; tested,
Gibbon, Brig. Gen. John, n.
Glennan, Asst. Surg. James D., , , ,
Godfrey, Capt. Edward S., , , ; at Wounded Knee, –18, , –24, ,
Good Thunder, , , ,
Goodale, Elaine, –61, , , , –33.
Gordon, Neb.,
Grand Army of the Republic,
Grand River, , , , , , , , , , , , ; Sitting Bull at, ; passim; battle at, –63
Grass, John, , , , n., ,
Grass Creek,
Gray Eagle, –58
Great Sioux Reservation, –21, , , , ; map, ; reduction, –59
Gresham, Lt. John C., , ,
Grindstone, Mr.,
Grindstone Butte Creek,
Grouard, Frank,
Hale, Lt. Harry C., , –78
Hampton Indian School, Va.,
Hanaghan, Sgt. James,
Hare, Bishop W. H., , –38, , ,
Harney Spring, S.D., ,
_Harper's Weekly_ , ,
Harries, George H., –84
Harrison, Pres. Benjamin, , , , , –11, –26, , , –45, , , , ; and Sioux land agreement, –58; and visit of Sioux chiefs,
Hart, Pvt. Jerry,
Haslam, Robert H. (Pony Bob),
Hawk Man No. 1, , , ,
Hawk Man No. 2,
Hawthorne, Lt. Harry L., , , , , –02, ; wounded, , n.
He Dog, , , ,
Heart River,
Heliographs, ,
Henissee, Capt. A. G., , , ,
Henry, Maj. Guy V., , , , , , , , –60; march to Pine Ridge, –36; at Drexel Mission, –40; at final review,
"Henry's Brunettes." _See_ Ninth Cavalry
Hermosa, S.D.,
High Hawk, , , , , ,
High Pine,
His Fight,
Hoff, Asst. Surg. J. Van R., , , , , ,
Hollow-Horn-Bear,
Holy Medicine,
Holy Rosary Catholic Mission, S.D. _See_ Drexel Mission
Homestead Laws,
Hopkins, A. C., –73
Horn Cloud,
Horn Cloud, Dewey. _See_ Beard
Horn Cloud, Joseph,
Horn Cloud, Sherman,
Horn Cloud, William, ,
Hotchkiss Gun, , , , , , , , –96, , , , ; at Grand River fight, –62; description, –02; at Wounded Knee, –16, –19, –22, ; at Drexel Mission, –40
Hump, , –54, –82, –97, , , ; detached from dancers, –32; and Hunkpapa refugees, –78
Hunkpapa Sioux. _See_ Sioux Indians, Hunkpapa
Hurst, Capt. Joseph H., –78; military agent at Cheyenne River, –81
Hyde, Charles L., ,
Ilsley, Capt. Charles S., ; at Wounded Knee, ; at Drexel Mission, –40
Indian Appropriation Act of _1889_ , ,
Indian Appropriation Act of _1890_ ,
Indian Appropriation Act of _1891_ ,
Indian Appropriation Act of _1892_ ,
Indian barrier, vii–viii
Indian Bureau. _See_ U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs
Indian Education, –37
Indian Messiah, –61, , , , , ,
origin, –67
Wovoka as, n.
A. C. Hopkins as, –73. _See also_ Wovoka
Indian Offenses, –33,
Indian Police, , , , , , , , , –94, , –98, –09,
and death of Sitting Bull, –66; and public reaction to death of Sitting Bull, –69
Indian Policy, , , , ; Miles' proposals, –74
Indian Reform Groups, –39
Indian Rights Association, , , ,
Indian Schools, –37, , , , ,
Indian Treaty System,
Interior Department. _See_ U.S. Department of the Interior
Iron Bird,
Iron Nation,
Iron Thunder,
Jackson, Capt. Henry, , ; at Wounded Knee, –18, , –27,
Janis, "Young Nick,"
Josephus,
Junkin, Insp. W. W.,
Jutz, Fr. John, , , ; peace mission, –39
Kansas,
Kelley, William F., , ,
Kent, Maj. J. Ford, Sumner investigation, ; Wounded Knee investigation, –49; Few Tails investigation, –65
Kenzie, Lt. John, , ,
Kerr, Capt. John B.,
Kicking Bear, –62, , , –07, , , , , , , , , , ; introduces Ghost Dance at Pine Ridge, ; at Rosebud, ; at Cheyenne River, ; at Standing Rock, –98; conference with Fr. Jutz, ; invites Sitting Bull to Stronghold, –53; decision to surrender, –92; joins with refugees from Pine Ridge, –33, ; opposes surrender, ; surrenders, ; deported, –72
Kicks Back, ,
Kills-the-Enemy,
Knife Chief,
Kyle, S.D.,
Lame Deer, ,
Lance (Indian), , ,
Land Agreement. _See_ Sioux Act
Lawrence Indian School, Kans.,
Lea, A. T., –55, , , –18,
Lee, Capt. Jesse M., ; military agent at Rosebud, –81
LeMay, Vet. Surg. Daniel,
Lincoln, Neb.,
Lip (Indian), , ,
Little (Indian), –09, ,
Little Bat. _See_ Gamier
Little Big Man,
Little Bighorn, Battle of, , , , , , , , ,
Little Chief, , , , , ; moved to Mont.,
Little Eagle,
Little Eagle Mission, S.D.,
Little Hawk, ,
Little Horse, –90
Little Wound, , , , , , , , , , ; attitude toward Ghost Dance, , –05; trance of, –91; flight from Pine Ridge, ,
Lone Man, John, , ; and death of Sitting Bull, –60
Long Pine, Neb.,
Loud, Capt. John S., ,
Love, Agt. Leonard,
Lower Brulé Agency and Reservation, S.D., , , , , , ; map, , –71; suppression of Ghost Dance at, –31; attempt to reduce, –84
McCall, Alex, –67
McChesney, Agt. Charles E., , , , , , , ,
McCormick, Lt. L. S., , ; at Wounded Knee,
McGaa, William C., –92
McGillycuddy, Agt. Valentine T., , , , , , , , , , , , ,
McLaughlin, Agt. James, , , , , , , , , , n., , , –102, , , , –66, , –50, ; and attempted arrest of Sitting Bull, –26; and plans for arrest of Sitting Bull, –57; and public reaction to death of Sitting Bull, –69; and military control of Standing Rock, –82
Mahdi of Allah,
Mandan, N.D.,
Mann, Lt. James D., , ; at Wounded Knee, , –12, ; at Drexel Mission, –40
Marshall, Lt. F. C., –65
Mash-the-Kettle, ,
Mason Valley, Nev., , , ; Ghost Dance in, –67
Maus, Capt. Marion P.,
Meade County, S.D., ,
Medicine Men, –16,
Medicine Root Creek, , , , , ,
Mellette, Gov. Arthur C., ,
Merriam, Col. Henry C., , , , , ; moves up Cheyenne River, –76, , , ; and Few Tails affair, –65
Merritt, Brig. Gen. Wesley, –30
Merrivale, Frank, ,
Middle (Indian), ,
Miles, Maj. Gen. Nelson A., , , –05, , –11, –16, –19, –48, , , , , n., n., , n.; and attempted arrest of Sitting Bull, –26; advocates military control of Sioux, , –28, , , –82; differences with Crook, –29; accused of presidential ambitions, –30; and Hump, –32; rebukes Brooke, –40; rejects Brooke's attack plan, –45; orders arrest of Sitting Bull, ; establishes headquarters at Rapid City, –82; and escape of Big Foot, –86; and search for Big Foot, , ; attack on Forsyth, ; on Drexel Mission, –41; arrival at Pine Ridge, –44; investigation of Forsyth, –49; advocates compensation of Wounded Knee survivors, –50; disposition of troops after Wounded Knee, –53; diplomatic efforts, –56, –60; and surrender of Kicking Bear, ; and Few Tails affair, –65; and Plenty Horses, ; at final review, –70; leaves Pine Ridge, ; disposition of prisoners, –73; proposed Sioux policy, –74; article, ; and visit of Sioux chiefs to Washington, –77
Military control of agencies, , –28, , , –82
Miller, Henry, murdered, ,
Miniconjou Sioux. _See_ Sioux Indians, Miniconjou
Minnesota River,
Missionaries, , –34
Mississippi River, ,
Missouri River, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Montana, , , , , , ,
Mooney, James, –70, , n., ; book, _Ghost-Dance Religion_ , viii, n.
Moreau River,
Morgan, CIA Thomas J., –39, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; and ration cut, n.; on dispatch of troops to Sioux reservations, ; opposes Indians in circuses, ; and military control of agencies, –82
Morisette, Oliver,
Mormon Church, –65; and Ghost Dance, n.
Mosseau, Louis, , –93, , ,
Moylan, Capt. Myles, , , ; at Wounded Knee, ,
Nakaidoklini,
Narcelle, Narcisse, ,
National Indian Defense Association, ,
Nebraska, , , , , , , ,
Nebraska National Guard,
_Nebraska State Journal_ , ,
Nevada, , ; Ghost Dance in, –67
New Mexico, , ,
_New York Herald_ ,
Newcastle, Wyo.,
Newell, Agt. Cicero, ,
Nicholson, Lt. W. J., ; at Wounded Knee, , –09
Nickel, Hosp. Steward August,
Ninth Cavalry, –14, , , , –92, , , ; march to Pine Ridge, –36; at Drexel Mission, –40; at final review,
No Flesh,
No Water, n., , ,
Noble, Sec. Int. John W., , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; and Sioux land agreement, –58; order for military control of reservations, ; and death of Sitting Bull, ; and visiting Sioux chiefs, –77
Nolland, Mr.,
_North American Review_ , ,
North Dakota, , , , , ,
North Platte, Neb.,
Northern Pacific Railroad,
Nowlan, Capt. Henry J., , ; at Wounded Knee,
Oak Creek, , , , passim
Oelrichs, S.D., , ,
Offley, Lt. Col. R. H., ,
Oglala Scouts, , , , , , , –43; at Wounded Knee, , , , , , ,
Oglala Sioux Indians. _See_ Sioux Indians, Oglala
Oklahoma, ,
Old Hawk,
Old Hand,
Old-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses,
Omaha, Neb., , ,
Omaha _Daily Bee_ , , ,
Omaha _World-Herald_ ,
Omnibus Bill,
One Bull, n.
One Feather, and Few Tails affair, –65
Oregon,
Pacific Northwest, ,
Paiute Indians, ; Ghost Dance among, –67
Palmer, Agt. Perain P., –97; and Cherry Creek dance,
Pass Creek, , , , , , , , ,
Peano, William,
Pearce, Charles E., –84
Pearce Commission, –84
Penney, Capt. Charles G.,
Perry, Lt. A. W.,
Pettigrew, Sen. Richard F., , –03,
Philip, James,
Phinney's Ranch, S.D., skirmish at,
Pickler, Rep. J. A.,
Pierce, Capt. F. E.,
Pierre, S.D., –76, ,
Pine Bird,
Pine Creek,
Pine Ridge Agency and Reservation, S.D., , , , –26, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , n., , –82, –09, –12, ; passim, , , , , , , , , ; passim, , , , , , , –42, , , , , , , , , , ; map, , –71; Ghost Dance introduced at, –75, –85, ; boundary controversy, –79, , –73, , –84; census, ; arrival of troops at, –14; description, –35; peace efforts at, –42, , ; stampede of Indians from, –34; arrival of Miles at, –44; fortified, ; prisoners of war at, –73; military agent at, –82
Platte River, ,
Plenty Horses, murders Casey, –58; trial, –66
Poland, Lt. Col. J. A., , ,
Pollack, Hosp. Steward Oscar,
Pontiac, ,
Popé,
Porcupine (Cheyenne), n.; version of Ghost Dance,
Porcupine (Oglala),
Porcupine Butte, S.D.,
Porcupine Creek, , , –96, ,
Pourier, Baptiste (Big Bat),
Powder River, , , , –41
Powell, Frank (White Beaver),
Pratt, Capt. Richard H., , –47,
Presbyterian Church, , , , ,
Preston, Lt. Guy H., , , , ; at Wounded Knee, ,; at Drexel Mission, –41
Price, CIA Hiram,
Primeau, Louis, , , ,
Proctor, Sec. War Redfield, , –11, , , , ; on Wounded Knee,
Pueblo Indians,
Puget Sound,
Pyramid Lake, Nev., ,
Quinn's Ranch, S.D., ,
Rain-in-the-Face,
Randall, Maj. George M., –54
Rapid City, S.D., , , , ,
Rapid Creek, , , , , ,
Ration System, –24, , , , , –57
Reade, Capt. Philip,
Red Bear, ,
Red Bird,
Red Cloud, , , , , , , , , , , , –59, , , , n., , , ; attitude toward Ghost Dance, , , –36; abduction, –33, ; efforts to escape Brulés, –56; escape,
Red Cloud, Jack, , , , ; with Fr. Jutz in Stronghold,
Red Cloud Agency, Neb., –19, ,
Red Leaf, , ,
Red Owl, –63,
Red Shirt, , ,
Red Tomahawk, Sgt., –56, , ; and death of Sitting Bull, –60
Red Water Creek, , ,
Reed, Rev. George W.,
Regiment of Mounted Riflemen,
Remington, Frederic,
Reynolds, Sp. Agt. E. B., –94, , ,
Rhodes, Maj. Gen. Charles D., n.
Rice, Lt. Sedgwick, ; at Wounded Knee, , –23
Richard, Pete, –58
Riggs, Rev. T. L.,
Rio Grande,
Robinson, Lt. W. W., ; at Wounded Knee, , ,
Rosebud Agency and Reservation, S.D., , , , , , , , , , , , , , –51, , , , , , , , , –83, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; ration cut at, n.; map, , –71; Ghost Dance introduced at, , ; boundary dispute, –79, , –73, , –84; census, , ; arrival of troops at, ; return of prisoners to, –73; military agent at, –81
Rosebud Creek, Battle of, , ,
Royer, Agt. Daniel F., –05, , , , , , , , , , , , ; calls for troops, –11; dismissed, –80
Ruger, Brig. Gen. Thomas H., , , , , , , , ; investigation of Ghost Dance, ; ordered to arrest Sitting Bull, ; attitude toward Big Foot, , , ,
Running Horse,
Rushville, Neb., , , , , , , , ,
Russell, Don, n.
Sage Creek,
Sage Creek Pass, S.D.,
Saint Paul, Minn., , ,
Salt Lake City, Utah,
Sanford, Lt. Col. George B., , , ,
Sans Arc Sioux. _See_ Sioux Indians, Sans Arc
Schofield, Maj. Gen. John M., , , –45, , ; on Wounded Knee,
Schurz, Carl,
Scott, Capt. Hugh L.,
Second Cavalry,
Second Infantry, , , , , , –60
Sells, CIA Cato,
Selwyn, William T., n., –74,
Seventeenth Infantry, ,
Seventh Cavalry, , , –19, , , –37, , ; and search for Big Foot, –93; apprehends Big Foot, –97; Forsyth ordered to Wounded Knee, –99; organization, ; at Wounded Knee, –28; return from Wounded Knee, –35; Battle of Drexel Mission, –41; Wounded Knee investigation, –49; at final review, –70
Seventh Infantry, , –76, , , , ,
Shafter, Col. William R., , , ,
Shaggy Feather,
Shaker Religion,
Shamans. _See_ Medicine Men
Shangreau, John, ; and apprehension of Big Foot, –96; at Wounded Knee, –08, ,
Shangreau, Louis, , ; peace effort, –43
Shave Head, Sgt., , , ; and death of Sitting Bull, –60, ; death, –65
Shell Boy,
Sheridan, Lt. Gen. Philip H.,
Shirt Wearers, ,
Short Bull, –62, , –95, , , , , , , , , , ; speech, –07; and Jutz peace effort, ; role in Shangreau peace effort, –42; invites Sitting Bull to Stronghold, –53; decision to surrender, –92; joins with refugees from Pine Ridge, –33, ; opposes surrender, ; deported, –72
Shoshoni Indians, , ,
Sickel, Lt. Horatio G., ,
Sickels, Emma,
Sioux Act of _1888_ , –47,
Sioux Act of _1889_ , –49, , ; map
_Sioux City Journal_ , –73
Sioux Commission of _1888_ , , –47
Sioux Commission of _1889_ , , –55, , , , , , , , , , , ,
Sioux Indians, ; old way of life, –17; population, ; visit of chiefs to Washington, –77.;
BLACKFEET, , , .;
BRULÉ, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –31, , , , ; boundary dispute, –79, , –73, , –84; Ghost Dance introduced among, ; in Stronghold, –37; surrender of Two Strike, ; stampede from Pine Ridge, –33, ; at Drexel Mission, –41; reluctance to surrender, , –59; surrender, –61; watch final review, , ; disposition of prisoners, –73.
HUNKPAPA, , , , , –57, , ; Ghost Dance introduced among, –98; dance among, –51; flight from Grand River, ; refugees from Grand River, –79, –43, –73; MINICONJOU, , , , , , ; Ghost Dance introduced among, ; dances on Cherry Creek, –32; unite with Hunkpapa refugees, –79; escape of Big Foot, –86; search for Big Foot, –90, –93; flight of Big Foot, –91, –94; surrender of Big Foot, –99; at Wounded Knee, –28; casualties at Pine Ridge, –35; disposition of prisoners, –73.;
OGLALA, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; political organization, –11; boundary controversy, , , –73, , –84; Ghost Dance introduced among, –85; stampede from Pine Ridge, –33, ; desire to surrender, –56, ; surrender, –61; watch final review, .;
SANS ARC, , .;
TETON, , ,, ; old way of life, –17; economy, –9, , , ; political organization, –11, , ; warfare, –11, ; religion, –14, –34; gods, –14; confined to reservation, –20; reservation life, –39; treaties, –42; reduction of reservation, –57; ration cut, –56, n.; effect of land agreement on, ; introduction of Ghost Dance among, –62, –85; delegation to Nevada, –64, ; version of Ghost Dance religion, –74.;
TWO KETTLE, , .;
YANKTONAI, , , , , –31
Sisters of St. Francis, ,
Sitting Bull, , , n., , , , –81, –102, –07, , , , , , , , , ; attempted arrest, –26; arrest ordered, ; invitation to Stronghold, –53; death, –66; burial, –66; reaction to death of, –69; reaction at Pine Ridge,
Sixth Cavalry, , , , , , , , , ; search for Big Foot, –90; skirmish on White River,
Slim Buttes, Battle of,
Slocum, John,
Slocum, Lt. S. L.,
Smith, Lt. Col. A. T., , ,
Smith, Carl,
Smith, Sgt. Frank, , ,
Smith, Joseph, n.
Smithsonian Institution,
South Dakota, , , , , ,
South Dakota Militia, –44, ,
Spencer, Agt. L. F., , ,
Spoils System, –39, ; "Home Rule," , ; responsibility for Ghost Dance trouble,
Spotted Elk. _See_ Big Foot
Spotted-Horn-Bull,
Spotted Horse,
Spotted Tail, , , , , , , , , , , ; murder,
Spotted Tail Agency, Neb., –19,
Spring Creek,
Squaxon Indians,
Standing Rock Agency and Reservation, N.D., , , , , , –30, , , , , , , , , n., , , , , –81, –102, , , –26, , , , , ; map, , ; Ghost Dance introduced at, –98; death of Sitting Bull, –66; return of prisoners to, –73; military agent at, –82
Standing Soldier, , –43,
Starr, Paddy, , ,
Stedman, Capt. C. A.,
Stirk, Richard C.,
Stock Raising, –26,
Straight Head, –97
Strassmaier, Fr. Bernard,
Strikes-the-Kettle,
Strong Arm, John,
Stronghold, The, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; peace efforts in, –37, –43, , , –92; Brooke's plan for assaulting, –45
Strother, Lt. Louis H.,
Sturgis, S.D.,
Summit Springs, Battle of,
Sumner, Lt. Col. Edwin V., –33, , , , , , , , ,
and Big Foot, –75, –86; aids Plenty Horses, –66
Sun Dance, , –17, –33
Swan, Agt. William A.,
Swift Bear,
Sword, Capt. George, , , , n.,
Sword Bearer,
Tavibo,
Taylor, Lt. Charles W., , , , , –43; at Wounded Knee, , , , , ,
Tecumseh, ,
Teller, Sec. Int. Henry M., ,
Ten Commandments,
Tenth Cavalry, n.
Teton Sioux. _See_ Sioux Indians, Teton
Third Infantry, , ,
Thompson, Fred,
Thunder Bear, Lt., ,
Thunder Cloud,
Tippecanoe, Battle of,
Tompkins, Lt. S. R. H., , ,
Tongue River Reservation, Mont., –80, , , n.,
Torn Belly, , –94
Totems,
Touch-the-Cloud,
Trances, , –70, , –91,
Traub, Capt. Peter E., n.
Treaty of _1851_ ,
Treaty of _1868_ , , n., –41, , , ; map,
Tribal Council, , , ,
Tupper, Maj. T. C,
Turner, Frederick Jackson, vii
Turning Bear, , , ; conference with Jutz and Brooke, –39
Turning Hawk,
Twelfth Infantry,
Twenty-Fifth Infantry, n.
Twenty-First Infantry,
Twenty-Fourth Infantry, n.
Two Kettle Sioux. _See_ Sioux Indians, Two Kettle
Two Strike, –83, , , , , ; conference with Jutz, ; conference with Brooke, –39; role in Shangreau peace effort, –43; surrender, ; flight from Pine Ridge, –33,
United Press,
United States:
BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, , , , , , –39, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .;
CONGRESS, , , , , , , , , , , –50, ; and Sioux land agreement, –59; responsibility for Ghost Dance trouble, ; and arms for Northwest, –28; and Sioux relief, ; and Rosebud-Pine Ridge boundary dispute, .;
DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, , , , , , , , , ; conflict with War Dept., –28, , –82.;
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, .;
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, , n., , , .;
SENATE, , , ; bill to provide arms to Northwest, –28.;
WAR DEPARTMENT, , , , , ; and conflict with Interior Dept., –28, –82
Valentine, Neb., , , , ,
Varnum, Capt. Charles A., , ; at Wounded Knee, , –12;
Vestal, Stanley, , n.
Vilas, Sec. Int. William F.,
Voorhees, Sen. Daniel, n.; speech, –28
Wakan Tanka, –14, , ,
Walker, J. R., n.
Walker Lake, Nev., , n.; gathering of Indians at,
Walker River, ,
Wallace, Capt. George D., , , ; at Wounded Knee, , –11; killed, ; burial, n.
War Department. _See_ U. S. War Department
Warner, Agt. C. C.,
Warner, William, –51
Washington _Evening Star_ ,
Waterman, Lt. John C.,
Wazhaza Band (Brulé), , , , , –73,
Wears Eagle,
Weinert, Cpl. Paul H., –22
Weldon, Catherine,
Wells, Capt. A. B., ,
Wells, Philip, –94, , , , , , , n.; at Wounded Knee, –11, , –23
Wells, Mrs. Philip,
Welsh, Herbert,
Wet Feet,
Wheaton, Col. Frank, , , , –60
Whetstone (Indian),
White Beaver. _See_ Powell
White Bird, , ,
White Clay Creek, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –60
White Hawk,
White Horse, , ,
White Lance, ,
White Moon, –58
White River, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; skirmish on,
White River Line, , ; tightened, –60
White Thunder,
White Tail,
Whitney, Capt. F. A., n., ,
Whitside, Maj. Samuel M., –93, , ; apprehends Big Foot, –97; at Wounded Knee, –28; at Drexel Mission, –40; at final review,
Willow Creek,
Wilson, David, ,
Wilson, Jack. _See_ Wovoka
Wind River Reservation, Wyo.,
Wissler, Clark, ,
Wolf Creek, ,
Woodpecker Woman,
Wounded Hand,
Wounded Knee Battlefield, –5,
description, –98
Wounded Knee Creek, , , , , , , , , , –99, , , , , ; Battle of: viii, , , –30, , , , , , , , , ; map, ; casualties, –28; news of, ; interpretations of, –30; reaction to at Pine Ridge, –33, ; investigation of, –49
Wovoka, , , , , , , ; sketch, –67; doctrine of, –73; as Messiah, n.
Wright, Capt. Henry H.,
Wright, Agt. James G., , , , ,
Wright, Agt. J. George, , , , , , , ; suspended, ; reinstated,
Wright, Judge John V.,
Wyoming, , ,
Yanktonai Sioux. _See_ Sioux Indians, Yanktonai
Yellow Bird, , , ; at Wounded Knee, –12; death, ,
Yellow Breast,
Yellow Knife,
Yellow Thigh,
Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, ,, , , , ; role in inducing surrender, –59; and Few Tails affair, –65; in Washington, –77
Young Skunk,
. Charles A. Eastman, _From Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian_ (Boston, 1920), p. 112.
. Paddy Starr Interview, Ricker Collection, Nebraska State Historical Society. See below, Bibliography, p. 288, for further information about this important collection of source material.
. James Mooney, _The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, 14th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1892–93_ , Pt. II (Washington, 1896), p. 879.
. Eastman, p. 114.
. Ibid., p. 113.
. Mooney, pp. 879–81. L. W. Colby, "The Sioux Indian War of 1890-'91," _Transactions and Reports of the Nebraska State Historical Society_ , 3 (1892), 159.
. William Peano Interview, Ricker Collection.
. Quoted in Mooney, pp. 878–79.
. For the early history of the Sioux see Doane Robinson, _A History of the Dakota or Sioux Indians_ (2d ed. Minneapolis, 1956), chap. 1; George E. Hyde, _Red Cloud's Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians_ (2d ed. Norman, 1957), chap. 1, and _Spotted Tail's Folk: A History of the Brulé Sioux_ (Norman, 1961), chap. 1; and John C. Ewers, _Teton Dakota Ethnology and History_ (Berkeley, 1938). For classification of the Sioux see John R. Swanton, _The Indian Tribes of North America_ , Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 145 (Washington, 1952), 280–84. The seven Sioux divisions were Mdewkanton, Wahpeton, Wahpekute, Sisseton, Yankton, Yanktonai (Upper and Lower), and Teton. The first four comprise the Santee or Eastern Sioux.
. Wissler, "Societies and Ceremonial Associations in the Oglala Division of the Teton-Dakota," _Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 11_ (1916), 9–10.
. Hyde, _Red Cloud's Folk_ , p. 67.
. Quoted in J. O. Dorsey, "A Study of Siouan Cults," _11th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1888–89_ (Washington, 1894), pp. 431–32.
. J. R. Walker, "The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota," _Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 16_ , Pt. II (1917).
. Densmore, _Teton Sioux Music_ , Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 61 (Washington, 1919), 96.
. Bourke, "The Indian Messiah," _Nation_ (Dec. 4, 1890), pp. 439–40.
. Densmore, p. 86. The most authoritative treatment of the subject is Walker, "Oglala Sun Dance," but see also Gordon MacGregor, _Warriors without Weapons: A Study of the Society and Personality Development of the Pine Ridge Sioux_ (Chicago, 1946), pp. 90–91. A graphic eyewitness account by an Army officer is Lt. Frederick Schwatka, "The Sun-Dance of the Sioux," _Century Magazine, 39_ (1890), 753–59.
. Hyde, _Red Cloud's Folk_ , pp. 291–92.
. These figures include the Sitting Bull hostiles who surrendered in 1881. They numbered about 3,000, of whom 200 remained in Canada, where their descendants live today. About 1,300 of those who surrendered went to Cheyenne River Agency, 600 to Pine Ridge, a few to Rosebud, and the rest to Standing Rock. Sitting Bull and 153 followers, released from Fort Randall in 1883, went to Standing Rock. The Upper and Lower Yanktonais, though living on the Great Sioux Reservation, were not Tetons. Commissioner of Indian Affairs (hereafter CIA), _Annual Report_ (1880), pp. 19, 21, 33–34, 39, 51; (1881), p. 57; (1883), p. 48
. For a discussion of Indian policy during the period see Loring B. Priest, _Uncle Sam's Stepchildren: The Reformation of the Indian Policy, 1865–1887_ (New Brunswick, 1942); Laurence F. Schmeckebier, _The Office of Indian Affairs: Its History, Activities and Organization_ (Baltimore, 1927); and, as applied specifically to the Teton Sioux, George E. Hyde, _A Sioux Chronicle_ (Norman, 1956). A contemporary view is Herbert Welsh, "The Indian Question, Past and Present," _New England Magazine, 2_ (1890), 262–64.
. James McLaughlin, _My Friend the Indian_ (Boston and New York, 1910), chap. 7. Hyde, _Sioux Chronicle_ , p. 68.
. Senate Documents, 50th Cong., 2d sess., No. 17, p. 19. CIA, _Annual Report_ (1890), p. clxv.
. CIA, _Annual Report_ (1882), pp. 46–47.
. Ibid. (1884), p. 43.
. Ibid.
. Ibid. (1887), p. 17.
. Ibid., p. 48.
. Ibid. (1884), p. 38.
. Senate Documents, 51st Cong., 1st sess., No. 51, p. 22.
. Wissler, "Oglala Societies," p. 62.
. Hyde, _Sioux Chronicle_ , chap. 3, details these episodes.
. _Indian Cavalcade, or Life on the Old-Time Indian Reservations_ (New York, 1938), pp. 132–33.
. Doane Robinson, "The Education of Redcloud," _South Dakota Historical Collections, 12_ (1924), 176–78.
. CIA, _Annual Report_ (1880), pp. 46–47.
. Ibid., p. 41; (1882), p. 38. Consulting the Treaty of 1868, McGillycuddy thought he was acting illegally. Actually he was not, for the Agreement of 1876 expressly stated that "Rations shall, in all cases, be issued to the head of each separate family." For the first time, however, this could be tried with hope of success.
. McGillycuddy to L. W. Colby, Jan. 15, 1891, in Colby, "Sioux War," p. 179.
. _My Friend the Indian_ , pp. 90,100.
. Hyde, _Sioux Chronicle_ , chap. 2, details this episode. See also CIA, _Annual Report_ (1881), p. 54. The legal proceedings that followed this murder resulted in a Supreme Court decision that Indians could not be tried for crime under United States law and led ultimatly to extension of the law to Indian reservations. Crow Dog, however, went free.
. CIA, _Annual Report_ (1881), p. iii.
. Ibid. (1883), xv.
. Ibid., p. 42.
. Ibid. (1884), p. 46.
. Ibid. (1887), p. 42.
. Ibid. (1885), p. 18; (1886), p. 53; (1887), pp. 18–19.
. Ibid. (1884), p. 57; (1886), p. 82; (1887), p. 53.
. Ibid. (1883), p. 22; (1884), pp. 33, 54.
. Commissioner J. D. C. Atkins in ibid. (1885), p. xiv.
. Quoted in Walker, "Oglala Sun Dance," p. 159. For a good discussion of the impact of Christianity see MacGregor, _Warriors without Weapons_ , pp. 90–92.
. CIA, _Annual Report_ (1887), p. xvi; (1886), p. xxiv.
. Ibid. (1880), pp. 178–79; (1881), p. 53; (1884), p. 45.
. Ibid. (1884), p. 56.
. Ibid. (1887), p. 43.
. Hyde, _Sioux Chronicle_ , pp. 100–01.
. Quoted in M. A. DeWolf Howe, _The Life and Labors of Bishop Hare_ (New York, 1911), p. 204.
. Schurz to Herbert Welsh, April 6, 1894, Schurz Papers, Library of Congress, quoted in Mary A. Johnson, _Federal Relations with the Great Sioux Indians of South Dakota, 1887–1933_ (Washington, 1948), p. 16, note 56.
. Welsh, "The Meaning of the Dakota Outbreak," _Scribner's Magazine, 9_ (1891), 449.
. Board of Indian Commissioners, _Annual Report_ (1889), p. 139.
. Indian Rights Association (hereafter IRA), _Seventh Annual Report_ (1889), p. 10.
. CIA, _Annual Report_ (1887), pp. iv-x and 274, reproduces the law and discusses its proposed application in terms of contemporary official thinking. See also Schmeckebier, _Office of Indian Affairs_ , pp. 78–81.
. See CIA, _Annual Report_ (1888), pp. 294–301, for the text of the act.
. The report of the commisson was published as Senate Documents, 50th Cong., 2d sess., No. 17.
. McLaughlin, _My Friend the Indian_ , pp. 275–76.
. See CIA, _Annual Report_ (1889), pp. 449–58, for the text of the act.
. Bishop Hare to Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble, Jan. 7, 1891, reproduced in Mooney, _Ghost-Dance_ , p. 841. The report of the Sioux Commission of 1889 is in Senate Documents, 51st Cong., 1st sess., No. 51.
. The brief excerpts from Crook's diary reproduced in Martin F. Schmitt, ed., _General George Crook, His Autobiography_ (Norman, 1946), pp. 283–89, show how the general went about this. See also McLaughlin, pp. 284–85. McLaughlin, who believed the agreement as favorable as the Sioux would ever get, spent an entire night working on John Grass. When Grass changed front next day, the Standing Rock Indians followed suit.
. See, for example, Frank B. Fiske, _Life and Death of Sitting Bull_ (Fort Yates, N.D., 1933), pp. 27–28.
. CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), pp. 32–35, 192. Inspector F. C. Armstrong to Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble, April 7, 1890, printed in _Cong. Rec_ , 51st Cong., 2d sess., _22_ , Pt. II (Jan. 27, 1891), 1882. Report of the Sioux Commission of _1889_ , pp. 23–24.
. CIA, _Annual Report_ (1890), p. 49.
. See Report of the Sioux Commission of 1889, pp. 218–33, for transcript of the councils.
. Ibid., pp. 23–32.
. Morgan to Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble, Jan. 5, 1891, in CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), pp. 191–95, sets forth complete statistical data on the Sioux ration situation during this period. Commissioner Morgan had no reason to falsify the figures, for the blame demonstrably lay with the House of Representatives, and he said so. He claimed that each Sioux received 1.9 pounds of beef per day plus flour, bacon, coffee, sugar, corn, and beans, and he allowed about fifteen per cent for shrinkage of beef on the hoof. Capt. F. A. Whitney, who personally investigated the question at Rosebud, allowed thirty-five per cent shrinkage and arrived at a per capita allowance of ten ounces a day, which is still above the starvation level. See Whitney to Adjt. Rosebud Agency, Nov. 27, 1890, encl. to Brig. Gen. John R. Brooke to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Div. of the Mo., Pine Ridge, Nov. 30, 1890. (Hereafter, all correspondence not otherwise identified is from the National Archives.) There is also abundant testimony that the Sioux were in truth starving. So conflicting is the evidence, and so replete with variables is the problem, that the safest conclusion is that the Sioux were very hungry, and perhaps individuals were actually starving.
. "Rev. William J. Cleveland's Investigation of the Causes of the Sioux Trouble," IRA, _Ninth Annual Report_ (1891), pp. 39, 57.
. James D. Richardson, ed., _A Compilation of Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897_ (Washington, 1898), _8_ , 94–97.
. Morgan to Sec. Int., Feb. 4 and 8, 1890; Actg. CIA R. V. Belt to Agt. Anderson, Feb. 12, 1890; Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1890), 1, 191–92.
. Report of the Sioux Commission of 1889, p. 9.
. Ibid., pp. 1–11.
. Quoted in John G. Bourke, _On the Border with Crook_ (New York, 1891), p. 486.
. CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), pp. 182–91.
. IRA, _Ninth Annual Report_ (1891), p. 29.
. Elaine Goodale Eastman, "The Ghost Dance War and Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890–91," _Nebraska History, 26_ (1945), 28.
. Porcupine, George Sword, and William T. Selwyn—the first two, Indians, and the last, a mixed blood—are the main authorities for the gathering of the delegates. See, respectively, Brig. Gen. T. H. Ruger to Adjt. Gen. U.S.A., June 25, 1890; Selwyn to Agt. E. W. Foster, Nov. 25, 1890; and George Sword, "The Story of the Ghost Dance," trans. Emma Sickels, _Folk-Lorist, I_ (1892-93), 28–31. See also George Bird Grinnell, "Account of the Northern Cheyenne Concerning the Messiah Superstition," _Journal of American Folk-Lore, 4_ (1891), 65–66; and Lt. N. P. Phister, "The Indian Messiah," _American Anthropologist_ , o.s. _4_ (1891), 105–08.
. David H. Miller, _Ghost Dance_ (New York, 1959), pp. 3–14, 286–91, based on interviews with Cheyenne River Indians.
. Ibid., pp. 40, 42. J. R. Walker Interview, Ricker Collection (Walker was agency physician at Pine Ridge in the early years of the twentieth century and knew Short Bull). James G. Wright (the elder) to CIA, Jan. 22, 1891.
. Mooney, _Ghost-Dance_ , p. 764. Unless otherwise cited, this account of Wovoka's background is drawn from Mooney and from Paul Bailey, _Wovoka, the Indian Messiah_ (Los Angeles, 1957). Mooney's book is the most comprehensive source of authoritative information about the Ghost Dance. Bailey's work is a competent biography of Wovoka.
. The link between the Mormons and the Messiah Craze is shadowy and probably never will be sharply defined. Many whites, some in high places, accused them of fomenting the Indian troubles of 1890—an accusation that doubtless originated in the widespread hostility to Mormons and ignorance of their theology. Existing evidence will not sustain the charge but does suggest that the Mormons contributed indirectly to the form the religion assumed, as indeed did all Christian teachings. Some accounts speak of whites participating in Ghost Dances at Walker Lake. It is entirely possible that they were Mormons, for Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, had prophesied in 1843 that the Messiah would come to earth in mortal form during the year 1890.
. A. I. Chapman to Brig. Gen. John Gibbon, Dec. 6, 1890, in Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), 1, 191–94. Gibbon had sent Chapman, an Army scout, to learn the origins of the Messiah Craze then sweeping the western tribes. Josephus, corroborated by two white employees of the agency, related the story to Chapman. The whites of Mason Valley confirmed that the rain came as Wovoka had predicted.
. Warner to James Mooney, Oct. 12, 1891, in Mooney, _Ghost-Dance_ , p. 767.
. Report of Feb. 10, 1891, quoted in ibid., p. 783.
. Ibid., p. 782.
. Ibid., p. 657.
. Mooney concluded that Wovoka did not claim to be the Son of God. But as the delegates of 1889–90 universally conceived him as the Messiah, and as they all told of the scars on his hands and feet, I have chosen to use the term Messiah freely. It is possible that by 1891, when Mooney went west, Wovoka had modified his story from that of 1890. The important point, however, is that whether Wovoka actually represented himself as the Messiah or merely as a prophet, the delegates believed he was the Messiah.
. Sword, "Story of the Ghost Dance," pp. 29–30.
. Ibid.
. The Sioux version that follows is from ibid., the Cheyenne version from Porcupine's narrative in Ruger to Adjt. Gen., June 25, 1890.
. _Selwyn to Foster, Nov_. 25, 1890.
. IRA, _Tenth Annual Report_ (1892), p. 45. CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), p. 411.
. _Selwyn to Foster, Nov_. 25, 1890. Sword, "Story of the Ghost Dance," p. 30.
. Ibid. McChesney to CIA, June 16, 1890. Wright to CIA, same date.
. Hyde to Sec. Int., May 29, 1890. Belt to Sioux agents, June 7. Belt to Sec. Int., same date.
. Gallagher to CIA, June 14, 1890. McChesney to CIA, June 16. Wright to CIA, same date. McLaughlin to CIA, June 18.
. I can find only one source, the report of Dr. Daniel Dorchester, Superintendent of Indian Schools, in CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), p. 529, that explicitly states that a Ghost Dance was organized before August 1890. The weight of evidence, admittedly largely negative and indirect, leads me to discount Dorchester's statement. Mooney, pp. 846–47, citing Dorchester, says that a Ghost Dance was held at No Water's camp near Pine Ridge about the middle of June and that Ghost Shirts were here worn for the first time. A glance at Dorchester's report shows that Mooney misread it. After writing "As early as about the 20th of June the ghost dance commenced among the Sioux," Dorchester goes on to quote an eyewitness account of a Ghost Dance at No Water's camp that Mooney takes to be a description of the June 20 affair. The account, however, begins, "We drove to this spot about 10:30 o'clock on a delightful October day."
. Lt. W. P. Richardson, "Some Observations upon the Sioux Campaign of 1890–91," _Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, 18_ (1896), 520.
. Elaine Goodale Eastman, "Ghost Dance War," p. 29.
. Belt to Sec. Int., June 12, 1890. Morgan to Wright, July 31. Morgan to Gallagher, same date. Morgan to Wright, Aug. 30. Belt to Senator H. L. Dawes, Sept. 5. Belt to Senator R. F. Pettigrew, Oct. 2. Belt to Agt. A. P. Dixon, Lower Brulé, same date. Capt. F. E. Pierce to CIA, Feb. 12, 1891. Philip Wells Interview, Ricker Collection.
. "Proceedings (Condensed) of a Council Held with the Rosebud Agency Indians, April 24, 1890, by Inspector Junkin." Junkin to Sec. Int.: "Report on Census Troubles," April 27, 1 _890._ A. T. Lea to CIA, April 28. CIA, _Annual Report_ (1890), P. 45.
. Belt to Sec. Int., April 14, 1890. Morgan to Sec. Int., April 23. Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1890), 1, 188, 192.
. McChesney to CIA, March 8, 1890. Brig. Gen. T. H. Ruger to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Div. of the Mo., April 19.
. _My Friend the Indian_ , pp. 180–81. For a laudatory biography of Sitting Bull see Stanley Vestal, _Sitting Bull: Champion of the Sioux_ (2d ed. Norman, 1957).
. McLaughlin to CIA, June 18, 1890.
. See especially McGillycuddy to Colby, Jan. 15, 1891, in Colby, "Sioux Indian War," pp. 178–80.
. James G. Wright (the elder) to CIA, Jan. 22, 1891. J. George Wright (the younger), notes on Rosebud chiefs, encl. to Lt. Col. J. S. Poland to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Div. of the Mo., Jan. 13, 1891. Hyde, _Sioux Chronicle_ , pp. 207, 266. Hyde, _Spotted Tail's Folk_ , p. 31.
. I deduce Kicking Bear's role in the Ghost Dance revival from the following known facts. He went to visit the Arapahoes shortly after the religion was first suppressed in late spring. Dances were organized shortly after his return. They appeared first at Pine Ridge in August, then at Rosebud and Cheyenne River in September, and finally at Standing Rock in October.
. Capt. Marion P. Maus, "The New Indian Messiah," _Harper's Weekly, 34_ (1890), 944.
. "Dr. V. T. McGillycuddy on the Ghost Dance," in Stanley Vestal, ed., _New Sources of Indian History, 1850–1891_ (Norman, 1934), pp. 88–89.
. D. F. Royer to CIA, Nov. 18, 1890.
. This description of a typical Ghost Dance is constructed from the following eyewitness accounts of separate dances: Mooney, _Ghost-Dance_ , pp. 788–89, 822–23, 915, 924–25; Mooney, "The Indian Ghost Dance," _Collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society, 16_ (1911), 168–86; Sword, "Story of the Ghost Dance," pp. 28–31; "An Officer," "The Sioux of South Dakota," _Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper_ , 71 (Dec. 20, 1890), 372; E. B. Reynolds to CIA, Sept. 25, 1890; Mrs. James A. Finley, "The Messiah Superstition," _Journal of American Folk-Lore, 4_ (1891), 67–68; Mrs. Z. A. Parker, "Ghost Dance at Pine Ridge," ibid., pp. 160–62; Warren K. Moorehead, "The Indian Messiah and the Ghost Dance," _The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal, 12_ (1891), 161–67; and Gen. L. W. Colby, "Wanagi Olowan Kin (The Ghost Songs of the Dakotas)," _Proceedings and Collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society_ , 2d ser. 1 (1895), 131–50.
. "Story of the Ghost Dance," p. 31.
. Both quotations are from James P. Boyd, _Recent Indian Wars_ (Philadelphia, 1891), pp. 189–91, 194–95.
. The account of this episode is drawn from Gallagher's annual report, Aug. 26, 1890, in CIA, _Annual Report_ (1890), p. 49; Wells to McLaughlin, Oct. 19, 1890, in Vestal, _New Sources of Indian History_ , pp. 5–6; Reynolds to CIA, Sept. 25, 1890; and Philip Wells Interview, Ricker Collection.
. Wright's annual report, Aug. 27, 1891, in CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), pp. 411–12.
. Reynolds to CIA, Nov. 2, 1890.
. _Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper_ , 71 (Dec. 20, 1890), 372.
. My sources for Cheyenne River are P. P. Palmer to CIA, Oct. 11 and 25, Nov. 10 and 28, 1890.
. McLaughlin, pp. 184–90, reproduces Kicking Bear's speech verbatim. It was repeated to him word for word, "with that accuracy of memory that marks the unlettered," by One Bull, an Indian policeman who was also Sitting Bull's nephew.
. Ibid., pp. 189–93. McLaughlin to CIA, Oct. 17 and Nov. 19, 1890, CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), pp. 328–31.
. Vestal, _Sitting Bull_ , chaps. 34 and 35.
. _My Friend the Indian_ , p. 192.
. Carignan narrative in Fiske, _Life and Death of Sitting Bull_ , p. 32. This and another Carignan narrative in Vestal, _New Sources of Indian History_ , pp. 1–4, are the best sources on events at Grand River.
. Mary C. Collins, "A Short Autobiography," in Vestal, _New Sources of Indian History_ , pp. 66–67.
. Fragments of Mrs. Weldon's letters to Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and McLaughlin were found in Sitting Bull's cabin after his death. They are printed in Vestal, _New Sources of Indian History_ , pp. 92–115. In a letter to the CIA, Oct. 17, 1890, McLaughlin vented his annoyance at Mrs. Weldon. Before printing it in the CIA _Annual Report_ of 1891, pp. 328–29, the Indian Office softened his harsh remarks and deleted Mrs. Weldon's name altogether.
. Belt to Noble, Oct. 24, 1890.
. Belt to McLaughlin, Oct. 29, 1890, in CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), p. 330.
. McLaughlin to CIA, Nov. 17, 1890, in CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), pp. 330–31. McLaughlin, _My Friend the Indian_ , pp. 201–07.
. Collins, pp. 24–25.
. Sickels to L. W. Colby, Jan. 15, 1891, in Colby, "Sioux Indian War," p. 184.
. Wells to McLaughlin, Oct. 19, 1890, in Vestal, _New Sources of Indian History_ , p. 5.
. Belt to Royer, Oct. 3, 1890.
. Royer to Belt, Oct. 12, 1890.
. Belt to Royer, Oct. 18, 1890.
. Royer to Belt, Oct. 30 and Nov. 18, 1890.
. Royer to Belt, Oct. 30,1890.
. The speech, as reported by Capt. C. A. Earnest from Rosebud, is printed in Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), 1, 142–43, and in Mooney, _Ghost-Dance_ , pp. 788-89.
. Telegram, Miles to Adjt. Gen., Nov. 26, 1890, repeating telegram from Gov. A. C. Mellette of South Dakota, same date. For a biographical sketch of Philip see George Philip, "James (Scotty) Philip," _South Dakota Historical Collections, 20_ (1940), 358–406.
. Eastman, _Deep Woods to Civilization_ , pp. 93–96.
. Ruger to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Div. of the Mo., Nov. 16 and 26, 1890, in Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), 1, 189–91.
. Royer to Belt, Nov. 12, 1890.
. Belt to Royer, Nov. 12, 1890. Belt to Noble, Nov. 13. President Harrison to Sec. Int., same date.
. Royer to Belt, Nov. 15, 1890.
. Williams by command of Miles to Brooke, Nov. 17, 1890. Miles to Adjt. Gen., same date.
. The figures are those of Rev. William J. Cleveland and are generally supported by reports of the agents. IRA, _Ninth Annual Report_ (1891), p. 30.
. Morgan to Noble, Dec. 12, 1890.
. The 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry were Negro regiments with white officers.
. Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), 1, 143–45; see also Miles to Adjt. Gen., Nov. 28, 1890.
. The Department of Dakota, with headquarters in St. Paul, consisted of the states of Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montana. The Department of the Platte, headquarters in Omaha, consisted of the states of Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming, the Territory of Utah, and part of Idaho.
. Williams (Asst. Adjt. Gen. Div. of the Mo.) to Brooke, Nov. 17, 1890 (three telegrams); Nov. 18 (two telegrams); Williams to Ruger, Nov. 18.
. Omaha _Daily Bee_ , Nov. 20, 1890.
. Royer to Belt, Nov. 21, 1890; Cooper to Belt, same date. Some writers have described with relish how Royer galloped down the main street of Rushville shouting that the Indians had broken and were descending on the settlements. Given Royer's excitable temperament, the story is easy to believe and may well be true. That he abandoned his post, however, is not a necessary corollary and is discredited by the testimony of Cooper and Brooke.
. Cooper to Belt, Nov. 22, 1890, encl. letter from Lea, same date. See also Miles to Adjt. Gen., Nov. 22, repeating telegram from Brooke, same date; and Boyd, _Recent Indian Wars_ , pp. 221–22.
. Two Strike's statement (interpreted by Louis Richard), in Thomas A. Bland, _A Brief History of the Late Military Invasion of the Home of the Sioux_ (Washington, National Indian Defense Association, 1891), p. 8. Smith to Miles, Nov. 21, 1890. Ruger to Miles, Nov. 21. Reynolds to Belt, Nov. 26. Boyd, p. 226. McGillycuddy to Herbert Welsh, Dec. 4, 1890, in Welsh, "The Meaning of the Dakota Outbreak," pp. 450–51.
. Quoted in Elmo Scott Watson, "The Last Indian War, 1890–91—A Study of Newspaper Jingoism," _Journalism Quarterly, 20_ (1943), 218.
. Julia B. McGillycuddy, _McGillycuddy: Agent_ (Stanford, 1941), pp. 262–63. See also "Dr. V. T. McGillycuddy on the Ghost Dance," in Vestal, _New Sources of Indian History_ , pp. 81–84.
. Elmo Scott Watson, "Pine Ridge, 1890–91," _Westerners Brand Book_ (Denver, 1946), pp. 3–4.
. Miles to Adjt. Gen., Nov. 27, 1890. For a suggestion of the role of the scouts in negotiations see also James H. Cook, _Fifty Years on the Old Frontier_ (New Haven, 1923), p. 233.
. Royer and Cooper to Belt, Nov. 30, 1890 (two letters), Dec. 1. Brooke to Miles, Nov. 30, Dec. 1. Williams to Miles and Adjt. Gen., Dec. 1. Royer to Belt, Dec. 4. For a contemporary description of the Stronghold see William D. McGaa Interview, Ricker Collection. A map of it is in Miller, _Ghost Dance_ , p. 154.
. Miles to Brooke, Nov. 22, 23, 24, 1890.
. Belt to Sioux agents, Nov. 20, 1890.
. McLaughlin to CIA, Nov. 21, 1890.
. Stanley Vestal, _Warpath and Council Fire_ (New York, 1948), pp. 298–99. Williams to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Dept. of Dak., Nov. 28, 1890, informed General Ruger, somewhat belatedly, of Cody's mission. The visiting card is on display at the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming.
Cody's able biographer, Don Russell, contends that neither Miles nor Cody had any thought of Cody's actually arresting Sitting Bull by force, that "Cody had no other intention than to have a talk with Sitting Bull and try to persuade him not to start a war," and "invite Sitting Bull to a conference with General Miles." But Miles' written orders to Cody, reproduced by Russell, authorize Cody to "secure the person of Sitting Bull and and [ _sic_ ] deliver him to the nearest com'g officer of U.S. Troops, taking a receipt and reporting your action." If this was not an order for Sitting Bull's arrest, certainly McLaughlin, Drum, and anyone else who read it cannot be blamed for regarding it as such. Despite his friendship for Cody, it seems improbable that Sitting Bull would have accepted an invitation from him to leave Grand River at this time. Whether Cody actually would have tried to use force, no one can say. See Don Russell, _The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill_ (Norman, 1960), pp. 358–61.
. Carignan to McLaughlin, Nov. 27, 1890, in Vestal, _New Sources of Indian History_ , pp. 8–10. This was in response to a letter from McLaughlin sent by messenger at 4:00 P.M. As Carignan's reply was sent back by the same messenger and was written at 10:30 P.M., McLaughlin must have received it about 4:00 A.M. on Nov. 28. Names of Cody's companions are from the Sioux Falls _Argus-Leader_ , Dec. 13, 1890; Washington _Evening Star_ , Dec. 4 and 29, 1890. Chadwick in the _Argus-Leader_ is authority for Cody's attire.
. Capt. Peter E. Traub, "The First Act of the Last Sioux Campaign," _Journal of the United States Cavalry Association, 1_ 5 (1905), 873–74; McLaughlin to Belt, Nov. 28, in CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), p. 331. Captain Traub's article furnishes the soundest support for the story of the officers' club. E. A. Brininstool, who got his information from another participant, tells the story entertainingly in "How Gen. Miles Blundered in Ordering Buffalo Bill to Arrest Sitting Bull," El Segundo (Calif.) _Herald_ , Dec. 28, 1928, copy in files of Order of Indian Wars, American Military Institute, Washington, D.C.; and in "Buffaloing Buffalo Bill," _Hunter-Trader-Trapper_ , April 1938.
. Narrative of Carignan in Fiske, _Life and Death of Sitting Bull_ , pp. 38–39.
. Belt to McLaughlin, Nov. 28, 1890. McLaughlin to CIA, Dec. 1. Proctor to Miles, Nov. 29. Schofield to Miles, same date. Williams to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Dept. of Dak., same date. Letters covering Cody's travel expenses, Dec. 1 to Feb. 6, are summarized in the Register of Letters Received, Hq. Div. of the Mo., 1890, vol. 1.
. Corbin to Ruger, Dec. 10, 1890. See also Miles to Schofield, Dec. 6, 1890.
. Harrison to Noble, Dec. 4, 1890.
. Miles to Adjt. Gen., Nov. 23 and 28, 1890.
. _New York Herald_ , Nov. 29, 1890. Washington _Evening Star_ , Dec. 1, 1890.
. Washington _Evening Star_ , Dec. 4, 1890.
. _New York Herald_ , Dec. 4, 1890. For the congressional story see _Cong. Rec._ , 51st Cong., 1st sess., _22_ , Pt. I, 44–48, 68–74, 167, 200; and _U.S. Statutes at Large_ , 51st Cong. (1889-91), _26, 1111_ -12. Interestingly, it was Senator Voorhees who had secured Hugh Gallagher's appointment as Pine Ridge agent in the Cleveland administration.
. Noble to CIA, Dec. 1, 1890.
. Washington _Evening Star_ , Nov. 21, 1890.
. Miles to Schofield, Nov. 26, with endorsements dated Nov. 29, Dec. 3, and Dec. 10.
. _Army and Navy Journal, 28_ (Dec. 20, 1890), 279.
. Dixon to Belt, Nov. 28, 1890. Belt to Noble, Nov. 29. Belt to Dixon, Dec. 6. Dixon to Ruger, Dec. 15. Dixon to Morgan, April 10, 1891.
. Cheyenne River Agency Clerk to Belt, Nov. 28, 1890; Palmer to Belt, Dec. 1.
. Special Orders, No. 278, War Dept., _Special Orders, 1890._ Miles to Brig. Gen. D. S. Stanley, Nov. 28, 1890. Corbin to Ewers, Dec. 4.
. Palmer to CIA, Dec. 9, 1890. Miles to Ewers, Dec. 10. Corbin to Ruger, Dec. 10 (two telegrams), Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), 1, 147.
. Wright to CIA, Dec. 5, 1890.
. McGillycuddy, _McGillycuddy: Agent_ , p. 262.
. Colby, "Sioux Indian War," p. 149.
. Cook, _Fifty Years on the Old Frontier_ , p. 233. Royer to Belt, Nov. 25, 1890. Red Cloud to T. A. Bland, Dec. 10, 1890, in Bland, _Brief History of the Late Military Invasion_ , pp. 19–21.
. Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), 1, 63–70.
. _New York Herald_ , Dec. 7, 1890. See also Brooke to Miles, Dec. 4 (two telegrams) and Dec. 5, 1890.
. Boyd, _Recent Indian Wars_ , pp. 245–46. _Nebraska State Journal_ (Lincoln), Dec. 7, 1890.
. Omaha _Daily Bee_ , Dec. 7, 1890. Boyd, p. 236 (quoting press dispatches). W. F. Kelley (reporter for _Nebraska State Journal_ ), "The Indian Troubles and the Battle of Wounded Knee," _Transactions and Reports of the Nebraska State Historical Society, 4_ (1892), 36. Brooke to the contrary notwithstanding, these sources all agree and are internally sound.
. Miles to Adjt. Gen., Dec. 6, 1890, repeating Brooke to Miles, same date. Corbin to Brooke, same date.
. Miles to Adjt. Gen., Dec. 6, 1890, repeating Brooke to Miles, same date. Miles to Brooke (two telegrams), Dec. 7, 1890.
. The only detailed sources for the Shangreau mission are press dispatches giving its result, summarized in Boyd, pp. 205–10. The essentials of these accounts are confirmed by several telegrams from Brooke to Miles, which, however, do not mention Shangreau. The scout later stated that he went by Brooke's authority, although what his orders contemplated is hazy. I have assumed that he accompanied Two Strike and his associates, for the timing of later events makes it obvious that, if he did not go with Two Strike, he left within a matter of hours afterward. Supporting sources for the following construction are Brooke to Miles, Dec. 9, 11, 12, 14, and 15, 1890; Colby, pp. 150–51; and Shangreau's statement to T. A. Bland in Bland, p. 9.
. Quoted in Boyd, pp. 207–08.
. Quoted in ibid., pp. 208–09.
. Quoted in ibid., p. 209.
. Omaha _Daily Bee_ , Dec. 14 and 19,1890.
. Miles to Adjt. Gen., Dec. 11,1890.
. Brooke to Miles, Dec. 15 and 16 (five telegrams), 1890. Miles to Brooke, Dec. 16 (two telegrams).
. See above, p. 128.
. Maj. E. G. Fechet, "The True Story of the Death of Sitting Bull," _Proceedings and Collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society_ , 2d ser. _2_ (1898), 181–82. Reprinted from _Cosmopolitan, 20_ (1896).
. For the details of this quarrel see Vestal, _Sitting Bull_ , pp. 251–52, 273–74; and Fiske, _Life and Death of Sitting Bull_ , p. 50.
. Robert P. High Eagle, "Note on Crow Foot," in Vestal, _New Sources of Indian History_ , pp. 55–56.
. Collins, "Autobiography," pp. 68–72. Robinson, "Sidelights on Character of Sitting Bull," pp. 191–92.
. Gall to McLaughlin, Nov. 29, 1890, in Vestal, _New Sources of Indian History_ , p. 40. Williams to Adjt. Gen., Dec. 1, 1890.
. McLaughlin to CIA, Dec. 5, 1890.
. See above, pp. 126, 131.
. Belt to Sec. Int., Dec. 5, 1890. Sec. Int. to CIA, same date. Belt to McLaughlin, same date.
. Corbin by command of Miles to Ruger, Dec. 10, 1890. Barber to CO Ft Yates, Dec. 12, in CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), p. 333.
. It is difficult to believe Sitting Bull so naive as to think McLaughlin might grant him a pass to go to Pine Ridge, but it seems clear from Carignan's letter, quoted below, that this was indeed the hope. Stanley Vestal _(Sitting Bull_ , pp. 287–90) implies further that Sitting Bull did not plan to go at all unless and until he received a pass. I believe the testimony of Carignan and Bull Head of the active travel preparations in Sitting Bull's camp is adequate contradiction of this assumption. Vestal prints the Sitting Bull letter, pp. 283–84.
. Primeau to Bull Head, Dec. 12, 1890, in Vestal, _New Sources of Indian History_ , p. 12.
. McLaughlin's annual report, Aug. 26, 1891, in CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), pp. 334–35. This source reproduces practically all the correspondence that passed between McLaughlin and the Indian Office during these critical weeks.
. Carignan to McLaughlin, Dec. 14, 12:30 A.M., in Vestal, _New Sources of Indian History_ , pp. 13–14. See also Carignan's narrative in Fiske, p. 44.
. This is reproduced in Vestal, _Sitting Bull_ , p. 282, and in McLaughlin, _My Friend the Indian_ , pp. 217–18.
. Fechet, pp. 182–84. Drum to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Dept. of Dak., Feb. 27, 1891, enclosing Fechet to Post Adjt. Fort Yates, Dec. 17, 1890, and Special Orders, No. 247, Fort Yates, Dec. 14, 1890, in Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), _1_ , 194–99.
. John Lone Man, trans. Robert High Eagle, "The Arrest and Killing of Sitting Bull," in Vestal, _New Sources of Indian History_ , p. 48. My account of the events of the night of Dec. 14 is drawn from this source and from Carignan's narrative in Fiske.
. Sources for the following paragraphs are Lone Man; McLaughlin's annual report, Aug. 26, 1891; Fechet, pp. 184–89; reports of Drum and Fechet cited in note 16; Fiske, pp. 50–52; and, although my version differs in important respects, Vestal, _Sitting Bull_ , chap. 38.
. Fechet, p. 186.
. Fiske, p. 52.
. Usher L. Burdick, ed., _My Friend the Indian, or Three Heretofore Unpublished Chapters of the Book Published under the Title of My Friend the Indian, by Major James McLaughlin_ (Baltimore, 1936), chap. 15.
. McLaughlin, _My Friend the Indian_ , pp. 221–22.
. Rev. W. H. H. Murray in _New York World_ , Dec. 21, 1890, reprinted in Bland, _Brief History of the Late Military Invasion_ , pp. 25–27.
. Bland to CIA, Dec. 27, 1890, with endorsements by Post Surgeon, Fort Yates, and by McLaughlin.
. Noble to Morgan, Dec. 31, 1890.
. McLaughlin's annual report, Aug. 26, 1891, in CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), pp. 334–38.
. Ibid. McLaughlin to Ruger, Dec. 22, 1890. Morgan to McLaughlin, Dec. 30, 1890. Ruger to Adjt. Gen., Jan. 1, 1891. Morgan to McLaughlin, Jan. 12, 1891. McLaughlin to CIA, March 3, 1891.
. Ruger to Miles, Dec. 18, 1890. Drum to Miles, Dec. 22, 1890. Ewers to Miles, Dec. 24, 1890.
. Omaha _Daily Bee_ , Dec. 23, 1890. Kelley, "The Indian Troubles and the Battle of Wounded Knee," p. 37.
. _Sioux City Journal_ , Dec. 25, 1890.
. Sumner's report, Feb. 3, 1891, in Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), _1_ , 223–24. This report reproduces much of the correspondence that passed between Sumner and his superiors, Dec. 8 to 24.
. Dewey Beard, Joseph Horn Cloud, and Philip Wells Interviews, Ricker Collection.
. Barber to Sumner, Dec. 16, 1890, in Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), _1_ , 229.
. Sumner to Miles, Dec. 18, 1890; Sumner to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Dept. of Dak., same date; Sumner to Ruger, Dec. 19; Sumner to Carr, same date, in ibid., pp. 229–30.
. Hale to Post Adjt. Fort Bennett, Dec. 26, 1890, in ibid., pp. 200–01.
. Dewey Beard and Joseph Horn Cloud Interviews, Ricker Collection.
. Statements of Lt. R. J. Duff and Capt. E. A. Godwin, encl. to Maj. J. Ford Kent to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Div. of the Mo., Jan. 31, 1891. This is a report of Inspector General Kent's investigation of Sumner's conduct in allowing Big Foot to escape and will hereafter be cited as Sumner Investigation Report.
. Joseph Horn Cloud and Dewey Beard Interviews, Ricker Collection.
. Hurst to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Dept. of Dak., Jan. 9, 1891; Merriam to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Dept. of Dak., Jan. 30, 1891, in Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), _1_ , 209–23.
. Sumner's report, Feb. 3, 1891, in ibid., pp. 224–25. Statements of Henissee and Capt. Philip Reade, Third Infantry, Sumner Investigation Report.
. Statements of Duff, Godwin, Henissee, Reade, and Capt. J. B. Hickey, Sumner Investigation Report. Joseph Horn Cloud and Dewey Beard Interviews, Ricker Collection.
. Sumner's report, Feb. 3,1891, p. 25.
. Ibid.
. Miles to CO Ft. Meade, Dec. 22, 1890, in Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), _1_ , 233.
. Sumner to Miles, Dec. 22 and 23, 1890, in ibid., pp. 233–34.
. Statement of Sumner, Jan. 25,1891, Sumner Investigation Report.
. Sumner's report, Feb. 3, 1891, p. 225. Statements of Sumner and John Dunn, Sumner Investigation Report.
. Statement of Benoit, Sumner Investigation Report. Dunn claimed (statement in same source) that he merely passed on Sumner's message. I accept Benoit's version as the more probable not only because of subsequent events but also because both Dewey Beard and Joseph Horn Cloud (Ricker Collection), who were present, remembered that "Red Beard" had warned that the soldiers would shoot if not obeyed. Their statements go into considerable detail, much of it to be discounted, but nonetheless agree with Benoit on the essential point that Dunn said the soldiers would shoot if necessary. Dunn's motives are not clear; probably he just wanted to appear a big man and accordingly embellished Sumner's message.
. Statement of Henissee, Sumner Investigation Report.
. Joseph Horn Cloud and Dewey Beard Interviews, Ricker Collection.
. Statement of Benoit, Sumner Investigation Report.
. Ibid. Joseph Horn Cloud and Dewey Beard Interviews, Ricker Collection.
. Reproduced in Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), _1_ , 231–32.
. Carr to Miles, Dec. 18, 1890.
. Sumner to Carr, Dec. 23, 1890, in Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), _1_ , 234.
. Lt. Col. W. H. Carter, _From Yorktown to Santiago with the Sixth U.S. Cavalry_ (Baltimore, 1900), p. 260.
. Carr to Miles, Dec. 26, 1890. Cornelius A. "Gus" Craven Interview, Ricker Collection.
. Joseph Horn Cloud and Dewey Beard Interviews, Ricker Collection.
. William D. McGaa Interview, Ricker Collection. Brooke to Miles, Dec. 25, 1890 (two telegrams). Miles to Brooke, Dec. 28, 1890.
. Brooke to Miles, Dec. 26, 1890 (three telegrams).
. Reproduced in "Proceedings of an Investigation Made Pursuant to Special Order No. 8, Headquarters, Division of the Missouri, in the Field, Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Jan. 4, 1891." Hereafter cited as WKIR (Wounded Knee Investigation Report).
. Ibid.
. Sources for this episode are conflicting and somewhat garbled accounts of Dewey Beard, Joseph Horn Cloud, and John Shangreau, Ricker Collection. This seems the most likely reconstruction of what happened.
. The following account of Big Foot's capture is drawn from John Shangreau, Dewey Beard, and Joseph Horn Cloud Interviews, Ricker Collection; testimony of Whitside, WKIR; Lt. John C. Gresham, "The Story of Wounded Knee," _Harper's Weekly_ , 35 (Feb. 7, 1891), 106 (Gresham was one of Whitside's officers); and "Lieutenant Hawthorne's Vivid Description of Warpath Life," unidentified newspaper clipping, ca. Jan. 1891, E. S. Luce Seventh Cavalry Collection.
. Testimony of Whitside, WKIR.
. Reproduced in WKIR.
. Testimony of Brooke and Forsyth, WKIR.
. Testimony of Whitside and Moylan, WKIR.
. See especially Richard C. Stirk and Charles W. Allen Interviews, Ricker Collection.
. Miles to Adjt. Gen., Feb. 2,1891.
. The gun is fully described in Edward S. Farrow, _Farrow's Military Encyclopedia A Dictionary of Military Knowledge_ (3 vols. New York, 1885), 2, 57.
. Col. Louis Brechemin to author, March 30, 1949, printed in _Westerners Brand Book_ (Chicago), _15_ (November, 1958), 71–72. Brechemin served under Capron in 1898.
. Testimony of Whitside, McCormick, Jackson, Edgerly, and Capron, WKIR; Maj. L. S. McCormick, "Wounded Knee and Drexel Mission Fights," MSS, December 1904, in E. S. Luce Seventh Cavalry Collection.
. John Shangreau and Joseph Horn Cloud Interviews, Ricker Collection.
. See especially statements of Craft, Frog, and Helps-Them, WKIR; Philip Wells, Joseph Horn Cloud, and Dewey Beard Interviews, Ricker Collection; Elaine Goodale to CIA, Jan. 12, 1891; and Elaine Goodale Eastman, "The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee Massacre," p. 38. Moylan and Robinson both testified (WKIR) that the fact that children were playing in and around the village during the council indicated that the Indians did not expect to fight. Both McCormick and Gresham ("The Story of Wounded Knee," p. 107) later wrote, but did not so testify at the inquiry, that the Indians had planned to fight and had resolved to do so in council the night before. The testimony at the inquiry makes this assumption doubtful.
. Forsyth's adjutant later gave the clearest picture of this phase of the proceedings: McCormick MSS.
. Testimony of Craft, WKIR.
. Shangreau Interview, Ricker Collection, is the only source for this conversation. Because the men did in fact follow Big Foot's advice as reported by Shangreau, I believe it probably happened substantially as recounted.
. Gresham, p. 107.
. Testimony of Whitside and Hoff, WKIR. Joseph Horn Cloud and Dewey Beard Interviews, Ricker Collection.
. This formation is described by all participants, but see especially testimony of Whitside, Varnum, Nicholson, Hoff, and McCormick, WKIR. McCormick, describing the gap, says, "Each troop being 75 to 100 yards from the apex." Given the close quarters in which the council was held, this seems much too high an estimate.
. Testimony of Whitside and Wells, WKIR.
. Sources for the village search: testimony of Whitside, Moylan, Varnum, Nicholson, and Ewing, WKIR; Charles W. Allen, John Shangreau, and Dewey Beard Interviews, Ricker Collection; Gresham, pp. 106–07; McCormick MSS. Mann's letter is printed in full in Lt. Col. Frazer Arnold, "Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee," _Cavalry Journal, 43_ (1934), 18–20.
. Testimony of Wells, Frog, Helps-Them, and Craft, WKIR. Wells Interview, Ricker Collection. McCormick MSS.
. Testimony of Whitside, Varnum, Hoff, Wells, Craft, and Frog, WKIR. Mann in Arnold, pp. 18–20. Wells Interview, Ricker Collection. McCormick MSS.
. Account of Turning Hawk in CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), p. 180. Joseph Horn Cloud and Dewey Beard Interviews, Ricker Collection.
. Mann in Arnold, pp. 18–20. Wells Interview, Ricker Collection. Testimony of Whitside, Varnum, Nicholson, Wells, Craft, Robinson, Frog, and Helps-Them, WKIR.
. Frederic Remington, "The Sioux Outbreak in South Dakota," _Harper's Weekly_ , 35 (Jan. 24, 1891), 61.
. Wells Interview, Ricker Collection. Maj. E. A. Garlington, "The Seventh Regiment of Cavalry," in Theo. F. Rodenbough, ed., _The Army of the United States_ (New York, 1896), pp. 265–66.
. Joseph Horn Cloud and Dewey Beard Interviews, Ricker Collection. Statement of White Lance in James H. McGregor, _The Wounded Knee Massacre from the Viewpoint of the Sioux_ (Minneapolis, 1940), p. 118. Charles W. Allen, a reporter, in a Ricker interview, said that as Big Foot lifted himself up, an officer shot him dead. Then, as Big Foot's daughter ran to her father, the officer shot her in the back. This officer, Allen told Ricker in confidence, was Lieutenant Reynolds. There was no doubt about it, for Allen knew him well. Ricker promised never to reveal the name of the murderer of Big Foot. Inasmuch as there was no Lieutenant Reynolds at Wounded Knee, or even in the Sioux campaign of 1890, this statement must remain open to serious question.
. Remington, p. 61.
. Dewey Beard Interview, Ricker Collection.
. Wells Interview, Ricker Collection. Testimony of Wells, WKIR.
. Testimony of Ewing, WKIR.
. Wells Interview, Ricker Collection. Cook, _Fifty Years on the Old Frontier_ , pp. 235–36. Mooney, _Ghost-Dance_ , p. 872. Testimony of Craft, WKIR.
. Watson, "Last Indian War," p. 9.
. Testimony of Whitside, Moylan, Wells, Nicholson, and Robinson, WKIR.
. Testimony of Capron and Nicholson, WKIR. McCormick MSS. The characterization is from Remington, p. 61.
. This episode does not emerge clearly from the sources, but see especially testimony of Craft, WKIR; Joseph Horn Cloud Interview, Ricker Collection; and statement of George Running Hawk in McGregor, pp. 111–13. Edgerly's testimony is silent on the role of Troop G in this phase, and his lieutenant, Brewer, did not testify at the inquiry.
. Testimony of Rice, WKIR. McCormick MSS.
. Maj. E. S. Godfrey, "Cavalry Fire Discipline," _Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, 29_ (1896), 259.
. Testimony of Nowlan, Godfrey, Donaldson, and Taylor, WKIR. Paddy Starr and Standing Soldier Interviews, Ricker Collection.
. Testimony of Tompkins and Godfrey, WKIR.
. Testimony of Whitside, Nicholson, and Craft, WKIR. Guy Vaughn Interview, Ricker Collection. Record of Events, Seventh U.S. Cavalry, Month of December 1890, E. S. Luce Seventh Cavalry Collection. Mooney, p. 869.
. Mann, in Arnold, pp. 18–20. Philip Wells and Charles Allen Interviews, Ricker Collection. Testimony of Wells and Frog, WKIR.
. Dewey Beard Interview, Ricker Collection.
. Weinert, in W. F. Beyer and O. F. Keydel, eds., _Deeds of Valor_ (Detroit, 1907), _2_ , 316. See also Harry L. Hawthorne, "The Sioux Campaign of 1890–91," _Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, 29_ (1896), 185–87. Col. Louis Brechemin, who served in Capron's battery in 1898, wrote to me in 1949: "Hawthorne was shot through his watch pocket and the works scattered through his anatomy. He had about five operations afterwards. He served in the same battery in later years, and the men said there was no living with him. Kept them at work all the damned time." This letter is printed in _Westerners Brand Book_ (Chicago), 15 (November, 1958), 71–72.
. Testimony of Rice, WKIR.
. Paddy Starr Interview, Ricker Collection. Statement of Rough Feather in McGregor, pp. 109–10.
. Wells, corroborated by Frog, WKIR.
. Testimony of Whitside, Hoff, Jackson, and Godfrey, WKIR.
. These bodies were found some days after the battle by Capt. Frank D. Baldwin of General Miles' staff. Miles, then in the midst of his attempt to discredit Forsyth, made much of the incident. Baldwin declared that there were no leaves on the brush and that the troops could therefore clearly see and identify their target, leaving the implication, which Miles reinforced, that Godfrey's men had deliberately killed women and children. Many years later Godfrey stated that on December 29 the brush was covered with dead leaves and pointed out that the blizzard that swept this locale on December 31 stripped the vegetation. The limbs were thus in fact bare when Baldwin visited the scene. Godfrey was, as he said, "shocked by the tragedy," although it seems clear that he himself had been a trifle hasty in giving the order to fire. The next morning, at Pine Ridge, he called Carey into his tent and asked him why he had shot the boy. "He was very penitent and began to cry, saying he was scared and only thought of self-defense; that he had been warned not to trust a wounded Indian, or take any chances— that he shot on the impulse of the moment." This interview was interrupted by the trumpet summoning the regiment to the Drexel Mission fight, and Godfrey, satisfied with Carey's explanation, let the matter drop. Godfrey also pointed out that Carey was one of the recruits he had picked up at Chadron on the way to Pine Ridge, and had been a soldier only a few weeks.
Pertinent sources: testimony of Godfrey, WKIR; Godfrey to Chief, Historical Section, Army War College, May 29, 1931, File W-12, Order of Indian Wars, American Military Institute, Washington, D.C.; Sec. War to Schofield, Feb. 12, 1891, with endorsement by Miles, March 2, 1891.
. Testimony of Jackson, Edgerly, and Taylor, WKIR.
. Testimony of Jackson, Godfrey, and Ewing, WKIR. Godfrey to Chief, Historical Section, Army War College, May 29, 1931. Philip Wells Interview, Ricker Collection. Three weeks later, still harassing Forsyth, Miles alluded to the sensitive matter of the lost guidon and directed that someone be sent to the battlefield to recover it. Lieutenant Donaldson rode out and found the staff and part of the banner. Maus to CO Seventh Cavalry, Jan. 20, 1891, with endorsement by Lt. L. S. McCormick, Jan. 20, and Capt. Henry Jackson, Jan. 22, 1891.
. CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), p. 130. William Peano Interview, Ricker Collection.
. Royer to CIA, Dec. 31, 1890.
. Recapitulation in WKIR. "On the 7th of January the body of the gallant officer [Wallace], which had been sent to his home in Yorkville, South Carolina, draped in the flag of his troop, was buried with solemn ceremonies at that place. The schools of the town and many of the people joined in the funeral procession; and when the well-deserved eulogies had been pronounced, the local military body fired a salute over his grave." _Harper's Weekly, 35_ (Jan. 17, 1891), 41–42.
. Mooney, p. 873. General Orders, No. 100, Hq. of the Army, Adjt. General's office, Dec. 17, 1891, in War Dept., _General Orders and Circulars, 1891_.
. McCormick MSS.
. McGillycuddy, _McGillycuddy: Agent_ , pp. 268–69.
. Watson, "Last Indian War." Kelley's story in _Nebraska State Journal_ , Dec. 30, 1890.
. Elaine Goodale Eastman, "Ghost Dance War and Wounded Knee Massacre," p. 36.
. William Peano and Capt. A. W. Corliss Interviews, Ricker Collection. Eastman, _Deep Woods to Civilization_ , pp. 108–09. Brooke to Miles, Dec. 29, 1890 (two telegrams). Miles to Adjt. Gen., same date. Royer to CIA, same date.
. Elaine Goodale Eastman, pp. 36–37. See also Eastman, pp. 108–09.
. Red Cloud to Bland, Jan. 12, 1891, in Bland, _Brief History of the Late Military Invasion_ , pp. 21–22.
. Ibid. Philip Wells and Joseph Horn Cloud Interviews, Ricker Collection.
. McCormick MSS.
. Cook, _Fifty Years on the Old Frontier_ , p. 236.
. Eastman, pp. 109–10.
. Royer to CIA, Dec. 31, 1890.
. Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), _1_ , 601.
. "The Bishop's Column," _Church News_ , January 1891, quoted in Howe, _Life and Labors of Bishop Hare_ , p. 240.
. William D. McGaa Interview, Ricker Collection.
. John Shangreau Interview, Ricker Collection. McCormick MSS; General Orders, No. 100, Hq. of the Army, Dec. 17, 1891, in War Dept., _General Orders and Circulars_ , 1891. Cyrus T. Brady, _Indian Fights and Fighters_ (New York, 1904), pp. 352–54. Brady, an Army chaplain, got the story from Henry in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.
. Philip Wells Interview, Ricker Collection.
. Sources for the Mission Fight: Philip Wells and John Shangreau Interviews, Ricker Collection; McCormick MSS; Garlington, "Seventh Regiment of Cavalry," p. 267; and documents in packet labeled "Additional Report on Investigation into the Battle of Wounded Knee Fought on December 29, 1890," filed in National Archives with WKIR. This packet contains Forsyth's report, Dec. 31, 1890, and testimony of Brooke, Henry, Preston, Rev. Cook, and John Shangreau taken by Maj. J. Ford Kent in January 1891. A map of the battleground is in Sec. War, _Annual Report_ (1891), _1_.
. Miles to _Adjt. Gen._ , Feb. 4, 1891.
. Standing Soldier Interview, Ricker Collection. Royer to CIA, Dec. 31, 1890.
. Miles to Adjt. Gen., Dec. 30, 1890.
. Schofield to Miles, Dec. 30,1890.
. Miles to Schofield, Jan. 2,1891.
. Schofield to Miles, Jan. 2,1891 (two telegrams).
. Miles to Forsyth, Jan. 4, 1891. Special Orders, No. 8, Hq. Div. of the Mo. in the Field, Pine Ridge, Jan. _4_ , 1891, in WKIR.
. Schofield to Miles, Jan. 6,1891.
. Washington _Evening Star_ , Jan. 5, 1891.
. Nov. 18: "One thing should be impressed upon all officers, never to allow their command to be mixed up with the Indians, or taken at a disadvantage."
Nov. _22:_ "Do not allow your command to become mixed up with Indians, friendly or otherwise. Hold them all at a safe distance from your command. Guard against surprise or treachery."
Dec. 7: "I must call your attention to my original order, not to allow the command to be mixed up with the Indians in any way, or to be taken at disadvantage. That will apply not only in a military sense, but in a diplomatic."
. I am led to this conclusion by the language of the telegrams that Miles sent to Schofield before the court convened; by his own (instead of, more properly, the court's) action in sending for Forsyth's military record; by his refusal to accept the first opinion of the court and the coaching that he obviously did to secure evidence that led to the second opinion; and by the extreme censure, far transcending the censure of the court, in the forwarding endorsement. Finally, Philip Wells (interview in Ricker Collection) relates several personal experiences that demonstrate that Miles was throwing his weight around in order to get the kind of opinion he wanted.
. WKIR.
. Ibid.
. Ibid.
. Reproduced in ibid.
. Reproduced in ibid.
. The record of this investigation is filed in the National Archives with WKIR.
. Sells to Sec. Int., May 4, 1920. Sells to Miles, May 7, 1920. Miles to CIA, March 13, 1917, quoted in Elaine Goodale Eastman, p. 39.
. 75th Cong., 3d sess., _Sioux Indians, Wounded Knee Massacre:_ Hearings before the Subcommittee on Indian Affairs on H. R. 2535, May 7 and 12, 1938.
. Carter, _Yorktown to Santiago_ , pp. 261–62. Carter, "Sixth Regiment of Cavalry," in Rodenbough, _Army of the United States_ , p. 249. Maj. Gen. Charles D. Rhodes, "Diary of the Brule-Sioux (Pine Ridge) Indian War" (MSS, 1940, East Search Room, National Archives). Carr to Miles, Jan. 2, 1891. Brooke to Miles, same date. Carr to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Div. of the Mo., Jan. 14, 1891. "The award of several Congressional Medals of Honor was recommended," remarked General Rhodes, then a lieutenant in the Sixth, "and some were actually awarded for this rather inoffensive, long-range engagement... which excited much controversy in army circles, as well as bitterness by officers who had won the Medal of Honor in hazardous engagements."
. W. R. Jones Interview, Ricker Collection. Statement of Wounded-Brother-of-White-Deer, in Lt. G. M. Williamson to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Dept. of the Platte, March 13, 1891.
. Miles to Red Cloud, Jan. 1, 1891. Miles to Red Cloud, Little Wound, Two Strike, Big Road, Little Hawk, Crow Dog, Knife, No Water, Turning Bear, Calico, White Face, Yellow Bear, Kicking Bear, Short Bull, He Dog, and all Indians away from their Agencies, same date. Miles to All Chiefs on or Near White Clay Creek, Jan. 2. Miles to Red Cloud, Jan. 4.
. Miles to Red Cloud et al., Jan. 1, 1890.
. Miles to Adjt. Gen., Jan. 3, 1891. Miles to Red Cloud, Jan. 4. Memo of Conversation, Miles with Sioux chiefs, Jan. 5. Miles to Big Road, Little Hawk, Jack Red Cloud, and High Hawk, Jan. 6. Account of events within the Indian camp is chiefly derived from intelligence reports submitted by the Cheyenne scout units. See Lt. E. W. Casey to Capt. M. P. Maus, Jan. 2, 1891; Maus to Brooke, Jan. 2; Casey to Maus, Jan. 3; Miles to Casey, Jan. 4; Brooke to Miles, Jan. 7.
. A good picture of the scouts is given by Frederic Remington, 'Lieutenant Casey's Last Scout,' _Harper's Weekly, 55_ (Jan. 31, 1891), 85–91.
. Statements of Bear-Lying-Down and Pete Richard in Lt. S. A. Cloman to Camp Adjt. Pine Ridge, Feb. 21, 1891. Getty to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Dept. of Dak., April 13, 1891. Philip Wells Interview, Ricker Collection.
. Miles to Adjt. Gen., Jan. 7, 1891. Corbin to Brooke, Jan. 8. Red Cloud to Bland, Jan. 12, in Bland, _Brief History of the Late Military Invasion_ , pp. 21–22.
. O'Connell to Miles, Jan. 6, 1891. For assessments of Young-Man-Afraid's role in the hostile camp see Miles to Adjt. Gen., Jan. 27 and March 13, 1891; CIA, _Annual Report_ (1891), p. 181; Kelley, "Indian Troubles and Battle of Wounded Knee," pp. 46–47.
. Miles signed Corbin to Brooke, Jan. 7, 1891. Corbin to Brooke, Jan. 9 (two letters). Corbin to Brooke, copy to Carr, Jan. 10. Colby, "Sioux Indian War," pp. 166–67.
. Brooke to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Div. of the Mo., Jan. 11, 1891.
. Brooke to Miles, Jan. 10, 1891. Brooke to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Div. of the Mo., Jan. 11 and 12. Miles to Brooke, Jan. 12. Brooke to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Div. of the Mo., Jan. 14 (two letters). Corbin to Brooke, Jan. 14 (two letters).
. Capt. W. E. Dougherty, "The Recent Messiah Craze," _Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, 12_ (1891), 577.
. Kelley, p. 47. Boyd, _Recent Indian Wars_ , pp. 274–79. Miles to Adjt. Gen., Jan. 15, Feb. 3 and 9, 1891. Ultimately, by gentle prodding, the Indians were induced to give up additional arms. By the end of January, the number of surrendered rifles had risen to 600 at Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and Pine Ridge. "Those I have seen," Miles reported on Feb. 3, "were mostly Winchester, Springfield, and Sharp's rifles. A few of little value were turned in, and much has been said in the public press about that class of arms, but very little about the former." "I may say," he added, "that I have no faith that the Indians will remain disarmed.... Some of the Sioux Indians have been disarmed three times, and many of them twice to my knowledge."
. Merriam to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Dept. of Dak., Jan. 14, 1891, with encl. Marshall to Merriam, Jan. 13. Kent to Asst. Adjt. Gen. Div. of the Mo., Jan. 25. Capt. F. E. Pierce to Actg. U.S. Ind. Agt. Pine Ridge, Feb. 21. Pierce to CIA, Feb. 24. Carr to Roe, Aide-de-Camp, Jan. 18. Miles to Adjt. Gen., Jan. 21. Boyd, pp. 306–09, citing press releases, Pine Ridge, Jan. 19. The above narrative is constructed from these sources, which contain the narratives of Clown and One Feather.
. IRA, _Ninth Annual Report_ (1891), p. 43.
. John H. Burns (Deadwood lawyer) to Capt. Charles G. Pierce, March 27, 1891. Sumner to Herbert Welsh, March 29. Welsh to CIA, April 3, with encl. Burns to Welsh, March 28.
. Quoted in McGillycuddy, _McGillycuddy: Agent_ , p. 272.
. U.S. Atty. W. B. Sterling to Adjt. Gen., May 1, 1891. IRA, _Ninth Annual Report_ (1891), p. 44.
. McCall to CIA, March 18,1891.
. CIA to Sec. Int., March 26,1892.
. _Ghost-Dance_ , p. 892.
. Charles G. Seymour, "The Sioux Rebellion, the Final Review," _Harper's Weekly_ , 35 (Feb. 7, 1891), 106.
. Miles to Cody, Jan. 16, 1891. Miles to Adjt. Gen., March 14, 17, and 19. Senators C. F. Manderson and A. S. Paddock, Reps. G. L. Laws and G. W. Dorsey to CIA, Feb. 26. Cody to CIA, same date (on U.S. Senate stationery). Morgan to Manderson, March 2. Morgan to Cody and Salsbury, March 9.
. Special Orders, No. 28, Hq. Div. of the Mo., Pine Ridge, Jan. 26, 1891. Lee to CO Troops in the Field, Jan. 31. Palmer to CIA, Feb. 14. Miles to Adjt. Gen., Jan. 9. Morgan to Sec. Int., Jan. 13 and 20. Barber to CO Ft. Sully, May 12. McLaughlin to CIA, May 13.
. Lt. G. H. Preston to CO Troops in the Field, Pine Ridge, Feb. 17, 1891, with endorsement by Shafter, same date, Brooke, Feb. 23, and Miles, Feb. 26.
. Miles to Dawes, Dec. 19,1890.
. Miles to Adjt. Gen., March 20,1891.
. See above, pp. 78–79.
. Miles, "The Future of the Indian Question," _North American Review, 152_ (1891), 1–11.
. "Rev. William J. Cleveland's Investigation of the Cause of the Sioux Trouble," IRA, _Ninth Annual Report_ (1891), p. 31.
. _U.S. Statutes at Large_ , 51st Cong. (1889-91), _26_ , 720–21, 1001–02.
. Miles to Adjt. Gen., Jan. 14, 1891. Adjt. Gen. to Miles, Jan. 13 and 23. Schofield to Miles, Jan. 16.
. David Graham Phillips, "The Sioux Chiefs before the Secretary," _Harper's Weekly_ , 35 (Feb. 21, 1891), 142.
. Quoted in Bland, _Brief History of the Late Military Invasion_ , pp. 11–14.
. Quoted in editorial, "Indian Truth and Eloquence," _Harper's Weekly_ , 35 (FEB. 21, 1891), 131. SEE ALSO WASHINGTON _Evening Star_ , Feb. 5 and 7, 1891.
. Miles to Adjt. Gen., March 13,1891.
. Dec. 21, 1890.
. Dec. 31, 1890.
. Morgan to Sec. Int., Dec. 23,1890.
. We have seen (above, p. 245) this technique used to get a court of inquiry for Colonel Forsyth. Miles also used it to have the Cheyennes transferred from Pine Ridge to Tongue River, and he used it in 1886 to have Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apaches sent to a Florida prison after the President himself had ordered otherwise. On this occasion, Miles succeeded in so confusing the issue that the President could only reprimand him for what in fact had been deliberate disobedience of presidential instructions.
. Morgan to Sec. Int., Dec. 12, 1890, with endorsement by Asst. Commr. Belt, Dec. 20, 1890. Schofield to Miles, Jan. 7, 1891. See also Miles to Schofield, Jan. 6, and Schofield to Miles, same date.
. Miles to Schofield, Jan. 7, 1891.
. General Orders, No. 2, Hq. Div. of the Mo., Pine Ridge, Jan. 12, 1891.
. Pres. Harrison to Sec. Int., Jan. 8, 1891. Capt. F. E. Pierce to CIA, Jan. 13. For evidence of activity by McLaughlin's supporters see correspondence in Vestal, _New Sources of Indian History_ , pp. 78–80. Royer told a reporter on Jan. 8: "It [removal from agency] is largely the result of mischief making and strong pressure brought to bear by the democratic press, printing so many falsehoods, gross slanders, and infamous matter generally concerning the administration of affairs and I will add this, in connection, that I do not think the republican press has done its duty toward me in not helping me to fight the unequal battle which I have been compelled to face." Omaha _Daily Bee_ , Jan. 9, 1891.
. McLaughlin to CIA, Feb. 4,1891.
. Morgan to Sec. Int., Feb. 14,1891.
. Miles to Adjt. Gen., March 20,1891.
. General Orders, No. 57, Washington, July 3, 1891, War Department, _General Orders, 1891_.
. See above, pp. 78–79.
. Penny to CIA, Aug. 7, 1891. The files of the Indian Bureau and Army contain voluminous correspondence on the Brulé difficulties. Most of the background is given in the terms of reference of the Pearce Commission (Morgan to Pearce, Appleman, and Harries, April 28, 1891) and in Morgan's brief of the commission's report (Morgan to Sec. Int., Nov. 10, 1891).
. Welsh, _Civilization among the Sioux Indians_ (Philadelphia, 1893), p. 21. IRA, _Eleventh Annual Report_ (1893), p. 52. IRA, "Protest by the Executive Committee... against the Passage of Senator Pettigrew's Bill for Removal of the Lower Brule Indians to the Rosebud Reserve" (Philadelphia, Feb. 23, 1893).
. Bailey, _Wovoka_ , p. 200; see also Mooney, _Ghost-Dance_ , p. 927.
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{"url":"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Borel%e2%80%93de_Siebenthal_theory","text":"# Borel\u2013de Siebenthal theory\n\nIn mathematics, Borel\u2013de Siebenthal theory describes the closed connected subgroups of a compact Lie group that have maximal rank, i.e. contain a maximal torus. It is named after the Swiss mathematicians Armand Borel and Jean de Siebenthal who developed the theory in 1949. Each such subgroup is the identity component of the centralizer of its center. They can be described recursively in terms of the associated root system of the group. The subgroups for which the corresponding homogeneous space has an invariant complex structure correspond to parabolic subgroups in the complexification of the compact Lie group, a reductive algebraic group.\n\n## Connected subgroups of maximal rank\n\nLet G be connected compact Lie group with maximal torus T. Hopf showed that the centralizer of a torus ST is a connected closed subgroup containing T, so of maximal rank. Indeed, if x is in CG(S), there is a maximal torus containing both S and x and it is contained in CG(S).[1]\n\nBorel and de Siebenthal proved that the connected closed subgroups of maximal rank are precisely the identity components of the centralizers of their centers.[2]\n\nTheir result relies on a fact from representation theory. The weights of an irreducible representation of a connected compact semisimple group K with highest weight \u03bb can be easily described (without their multiplicities): they are precisely the saturation under the Weyl group of the dominant weights obtained by subtracting off a sum of simple roots from \u03bb. In particular, if the irreducible representation is trivial on the center of K (a finite Abelian group), 0 is a weight.[3]\n\nTo prove the characterization of Borel and de Siebenthal, let H be a closed connected subgroup of G containing T with center Z. The identity component L of CG(Z) contains H. If it were strictly larger, the restriction of the adjoint representation of L to H would be trivial on Z. Any irreducible summand, orthogonal to the Lie algebra of H, would provide non-zero weight zero vectors for T \/ ZH \/ Z, contradicting the maximality of the torus T \/ Z in L \/ Z.[4]\n\n## Maximal connected subgroups of maximal rank\n\nBorel and de Siebenthal classified the maximal closed connected subgroups of maximal rank of a connected compact Lie group.\n\nThe general classification of connected closed subgroups of maximal rank can be reduced to this case, because any connected subgroup of maximal rank is contained in a finite chain of such subgroups, each maximal in the next one. Maximal subgroups are the identity components of any element of their center not belonging to the center of the whole group.\n\nThe problem of determining the maximal connected subgroups of maximal rank can be further reduced to the case where the compact Lie group is simple. In fact the Lie algebra $\\mathfrak{g}$ of a connected compact Lie group G splits as a direct sum of the ideals\n\n$\\displaystyle{\\mathfrak{g}=\\mathfrak{z} \\oplus \\mathfrak{g}_1\\oplus \\cdots \\oplus \\mathfrak{g}_m,}$\n\nwhere $\\mathfrak{z}$ is the center and the other factors $\\mathfrak{g}_i$ are simple. If T is a maximal torus, its Lie algebra $\\mathfrak{t}$ has a corresponding splitting\n\n$\\displaystyle{\\mathfrak{t}=\\mathfrak{z} \\oplus \\mathfrak{t}_1\\oplus \\cdots \\oplus \\mathfrak{t}_m,}$\n\nwhere $\\mathfrak{t}_i$ is maximal abelian in $\\mathfrak{g}_i$. If H is a closed connected of G containing T with Lie algebra $\\mathfrak{h}$, the complexification of $\\mathfrak{h}$ is the direct sum of the complexification of $\\mathfrak{t}$ and a number of one-dimensional weight spaces, each of which lies in the complexification of a factor $\\mathfrak{g}_i$. Thus if\n\n$\\displaystyle{\\mathfrak{h}_i=\\mathfrak{h}\\cap\\mathfrak{g}_i,}$\n\nthen\n\n$\\displaystyle{\\mathfrak{h}=\\mathfrak{z} \\oplus \\mathfrak{h}_1\\oplus\\cdots \\oplus \\mathfrak{h}_m.}$\n\nIf H is maximal, all but one of the $\\mathfrak{h}_i$'s coincide with $\\mathfrak{g}_i$ and the remaining one is maximal and of maximal rank. For that factor, the closed connected subgroup of the corresponding simply connected simple compact Lie group is maximal and of maximal rank.[5]\n\nLet G be a connected simply connected compact simple Lie group with maximal torus T. Let $\\mathfrak{g}$ be the Lie algebra of G and $\\mathfrak{t}$ that of T. Let \u0394 be the corresponding root system. Choose a set of positive roots and corresponding simple roots \u03b11, ..., \u03b1n. Let \u03b10 the highest root in $\\mathfrak{g}_{\\mathbf{C}}$ and write\n\n$\\displaystyle{\\alpha_0=m_1 \\alpha_1 + \\cdots + m_n\\alpha_n}$\n\nwith mi \u2265 1. (The number of mi equal to 1 is equal to |Z| \u2013 1, where Z is the center of G.)\n\nThe Weyl alcove is defined by\n\n$\\displaystyle{A=\\{T\\in\\mathfrak{t}:\\, \\alpha_1(T)\\ge 0, \\dots,\\alpha_n(T)\\ge 0, \\alpha_0(T)\\le 1\\}.}$\n\n\u00c9lie Cartan shouwed that it is a fundamental domain for the affine Weyl group. If G1 = G \/ Z and T1 = T \/ Z, it follows that the exponential mapping from $\\mathfrak{g}$ to G1 carries 2\u03c0A onto T1.\n\nThe Weyl alcove A is a simplex with vertices at\n\n$\\displaystyle{v_0=0,\\,\\, v_i=m_i^{-1} X_i,}$\n\nwhere \u03b1i(Xj) = \u03b4ij.\n\nThe main result of Borel and de Siebenthal is as follows.\n\nTHEOREM. The maximal connected subgroups of maximal rank in G1 up to conjugacy have the form\nCG1 (Xi) for mi = 1\nCG1(vi) for mi a prime.\n\nExtended Dynkin diagrams for the simple complex Lie algebras\n\nThe structure of the corresponding subgroup H1 can be described in both cases. It is semisimple in the second case with a system of simple roots obtained by replacing \u03b1i by \u2212\u03b10. In the first case it is the direct product of the circle group generated by Xi and a semisimple compact group with a system of simple roots obtained by omitting \u03b1i.\n\nThis result can be rephrased in terms of the extended Dynkin diagram of $\\mathfrak{g}$ which adds an extra node for the highest root as well as the labels mi. The maximal subalgebras $\\mathfrak{h}$ of maximal rank are either non-semisimple or semimsimple. The non-semisimple ones are obtained by deleting two nodes from the extended diagram with coefficient one. The corresponding unlabelled diagram gives the Dynkin diagram semisimple part of $\\mathfrak{h}$, the other part being a one-dimensional factor. The Dynkin diagrams for the semisimple ones are obtained by removing one node with coefficient a prime. This leads to the following possibilities:\n\n\u2022 An: Ap \u00d7 A np \u2212 1 \u00d7 T (non-semisimple)\n\u2022 Bn: Dn or Bp \u00d7 Dnp (semisimple), Bn \u2212 1 \u00d7 T (non-semisimple)\n\u2022 Cn: Cp \u00d7 Cnp (SS), An - 1 \u00d7 T (NSS)\n\u2022 Dn: Dp \u00d7 Dn - p (SS), Dn - 1 \u00d7 T, An-1 \u00d7 T (NSS)\n\u2022 E6: A1 \u00d7 A5, A2 \u00d7 A2 \u00d7 A2 (SS), D5 \u00d7 T (NSS)\n\u2022 E7: A1 \u00d7 D6, A2 \u00d7 A5, A7 (SS), E6 \u00d7 T (NSS)\n\u2022 E8: D8, A8, A4 \u00d7 A4, E6 \u00d7 A2, E7 \u00d7 A1 (SS)\n\u2022 F4: B4, A2 \u00d7 A2, A1 \u00d7 C3 (SS)\n\u2022 G2: A2, A1 \u00d7 A1 (SS)\n\nAll the corresponding homogeneous spaces are symmetric, since the subalgebra is the fixed point algebra of an inner automorphism of period 2, apart from G2\/A2, F4\/A2\u00d7A2, E6\/A2\u00d7A2\u00d7A2, E7\/A2\u00d7A5 and all the E8 spaces other than E8\/D8 and E8\/E7\u00d7A1. In all these exceptional cases the subalgebra is the fixed point algebra of an inner automorphism of period 3, except for E8\/A4\u00d7A4 where the automorphism has period 5. The homogeneous spaces are then called weakly symmetric spaces.\n\nTo prove the theorem, note that H1 is the identity component of the centralizer of an element exp T with T in 2\u03c0 A. Stabilizers increase in moving from a subsimplex to an edge or vertex, so T either lies on an edge or is a vertex. If it lies on an edge than that edge connects 0 to a vertex vi with mi = 1, which is the first case. If T is a vertex vi and mi has a non-trivial factor m, then mT has a larger stabilizer than T, contradicting maximality. So mi must be prime. Maximality can be checked directly using the fact that an intermediate subgroup K would have the same form, so that its center would be either (a) T or (b) an element of prime order. If the center of H1 is 'T, each simple root with mi prime is already a root of K, so (b) is not possible; and if (a) holds, \u03b1i is the only root that could be omitted with mj = 1, so K = H1. In the center of H1 is of prime order, \u03b1j is a root of K for mj = 1, so that (a) is not possible; if (b) holds, then the only possible omitted simple root is \u03b1i, so that K = H1.[6]\n\n## Closed subsystems of roots\n\nA subset \u03941 \u2282 \u0394 is called a closed subsystem if whenever \u03b1 and \u03b2 lie in \u03941 with \u03b1 + \u03b2 in \u0394, then \u03b1 + \u03b2 lies in \u03941. Two subsystems \u03941 and \u03942 are said to be equivalent if \u03c3( \u03941) = \u03942 for some \u03c3 in W = NG(T) \/ T, the Weyl group. Thus for a closed subsystem\n\n$\\displaystyle{\\mathfrak{t}_{\\mathbf{C}} \\oplus \\bigoplus_{\\alpha\\in \\Delta_1} \\mathfrak{g}_\\alpha}$\n\nis a subalgebra of $\\mathfrak{g}_{\\mathbf{C}}$ containing $\\mathfrak{t}_{\\mathbf{C}}$; and conversely any such subalgebra gives rise to a closed subsystem. Borel and de Siebenthal classified the maximal closed subsystems up to equivalence.[7]\n\nTHEOREM. Up to equivalence the closed root subsystems are given by mi = 1 with simple roots all \u03b1j with ji or by mi > 1 prime with simple roots \u2212\u03b10 and all \u03b1j with ji.\n\nThis result is a consequence of the Borel\u2013de Siebenthal theorem for maximal connected subgroups of maximal rank. It can also be proved directly within the theory of root systems and reflection groups.[8]\n\n## Applications to symmetric spaces of compact type\n\nLet G be a connected compact semisimple Lie group, \u03c3 an automorphism of G of period 2 and G\u03c3 the fixed point subgroup of \u03c3. Let K be a closed subgroup of G lying between G\u03c3 and its identity component. The compact homogeneous space G \/ K is called a symmetric space of compact type. The Lie algebra $\\mathfrak{g}$ admits a decomposition\n\n$\\displaystyle{\\mathfrak{g}=\\mathfrak{k}\\oplus\\mathfrak{p},}$\n\nwhere $\\mathfrak{k}$, the Lie algebra of K, is the +1 eigenspace of \u03c3 and $\\mathfrak{p}$ the \u20131 eigenspace. If $\\mathfrak{k}$ contains no simple summand of $\\mathfrak{g}$, the pair ($\\mathfrak{g}$, \u03c3) is called an orthogonal symmetric Lie algebra of compact type.[9]\n\nAny inner product on $\\mathfrak{g}$, invariant under the adjoint representation and \u03c3, induces a Riemannian structure on G \/ K, with G acting by isometries. Under such an inner product, $\\mathfrak{k}$ and $\\mathfrak{p}$ are orthogonal. G \/ K is then a Riemannian symmetric space of compact type.[10]\n\nThe symmetric space or the pair ($\\mathfrak{g}$, \u03c3) is said to be irreducible if the adjoint action of $\\mathfrak{k}$ (or equivalently the identity component of G\u03c3 or K) is irreducible on $\\mathfrak{p}$. This is equivalent to the maximality of $\\mathfrak{k}$ as a subalgebra.[11]\n\nIn fact there is a one-one correspondence between intermediate subalgebras $\\mathfrak{h}$ and K-invariant subspaces $\\mathfrak{p}_1$ of $\\mathfrak{p}$ given by\n\n$\\displaystyle{\\mathfrak{h}=\\mathfrak{k}\\oplus \\mathfrak{p}_1,\\,\\,\\,\\ \\mathfrak{p}_1=\\mathfrak{h}\\cap \\mathfrak{p}.}$\n\nAny orthogonal symmetric algebra ($\\mathfrak{g}$, \u03c3) can be decomposed as an (orthogonal) direct sum of irreducible orthogonal symmetric algebras.[12]\n\nIn fact $\\mathfrak{g}$ can be written as a direct sum of simple algebras\n\n$\\displaystyle{\\mathfrak{g}=\\oplus_{i=1}^N \\mathfrak{g}_i,}$\n\nwhich are permuted by the automorphism \u03c3. If \u03c3 leaves an algebra $\\mathfrak{g}_1$, its eigenspace decomposition coincides with its intersections with $\\mathfrak{k}$ and $\\mathfrak{p}$. So the restriction of \u03c3 to $\\mathfrak{g}_1$ is irreducible. If \u03c3 interchanges two simple summands, the corresponding pair is isomorphic to a diagonal inclusion of K in K \u00d7 K, with K simple, so is also irreducible. The involution \u03c3 just swaps the two factors \u03c3(x,y)=(y,x).\n\nThis decomposition of an orthogonal symmetric algebra yields a direct product decomposition of the corresponding compact symmetric space G \/ K when G is simply connected. In this case the fixed point subgroup G\u03c3 is automatically connected (this is no longer true, even for inner involutions, if G is not simply connected).[13] For simply connected G, the symmetric space G \/ K is the direct product of the two kinds of symmetric spaces Gi \/ Ki or H \u00d7 H \/ H. Non-simply connected symmetric space of compact type arise as quotients of the sinply connected space G \/ K by finite Abelian groups. In fact if\n\n$\\displaystyle{G\/K=G_1\/K_1\\times \\cdots\\times G_s\/K_s,}$\n\nlet\n\n$\\displaystyle{\\Gamma_i=Z(G_i)\/Z(G_i)\\cap K_i}$\n\nand let \u0394i be the subgroup of \u0393i fixed by all automorphisms of Gi preserving Ki (i.e. automorphisms of the orthogonal symmetric Lie algebra). Then\n\n$\\displaystyle{\\Delta=\\Delta_1\\times \\cdots\\times\\Delta_s}$\n\nis a finite Abelian group acting freely on G \/ K. The non-simply connected symmetric spaces arise as quotients by subgroups of \u0394. The subgroup can be identified with the fundamental group, which is thus a finite Abelian group.[14]\n\nThe classification of compact symmetric spaces or pairs ($\\mathfrak{g}$, \u03c3) thus reduces to the case where G is a connected simple compact Lie group. There are two possibilities: either the automorphism \u03c3 is inner, in which case K has maximal rank and the theory of Borel and de Siebenthal applies; or the automorphism \u03c3 is outer, so that, because \u03c3 preserves a maximal torus, the rank of K is less than the rank of G and \u03c3 corresponds to an automorphism of the Dynkin diagram modulo inner automorphisms. Wolf (2010) determines directly all possible \u03c3 in the latter case: they correspond to the symmetric spaces SU(n)\/SO(n), SO(a+b)\/SO(a)\u00d7SO(b) (a and b odd), E6\/F4 and E6\/C4.[15]\n\nVictor Kac noticed that all finite order automorphisms of a simple Lie algebra can be determined using the corresponding affine Lie algebra: that classification, which leads to an alternative method of classifying pairs ($\\mathfrak{g}$, \u03c3), is described in Helgason (1978).\n\n## Applications to hermitian symmetric spaces of compact type\n\nThe equal rank case with K non-semisimple corresponds exactly to the Hermitian symmetric spaces G \/ K of compact type.\n\nIn fact the symmetric space has an almost complex structure preserving the Riemannian metric if and only if there is a linear map J with J2 = \u2212I on $\\mathfrak{p}$ which preserves the inner product and commutes with the action of K. In this case J lies in $\\mathfrak{k}$ and exp Jt forms a one-parameter group in the center of K. This follows because if A, B, C, D lie in $\\mathfrak{p}$, then by the invariance of the inner product on $\\mathfrak{g}$[16]\n\n$\\displaystyle{([[A,B],C],D)=([A,B],[C,D])=([[C,D],B],A).}$\n\nReplacing A and B by JA and JB, it follows that\n\n$\\displaystyle{[JA,JB] = [A,B].}$\n\nDefine a linear map \u03b4 on $\\mathfrak{g}$ by extending J to be 0 on $\\mathfrak{k}$. The last relation shows that \u03b4 is a derivation of $\\mathfrak{g}$. Since $\\mathfrak{g}$ is semisimple, \u03b4 must be an inner derivation, so that\n\n$\\displaystyle{\\delta(X)=[T + A,X],}$\n\nwith T in $\\mathfrak{k}$ and A in $\\mathfrak{p}$. Taking X in $\\mathfrak{k}$, it follows that A = 0 and T lies in the center of $\\mathfrak{k}$ and hence that K is non-semisimple. [17]\n\nIf on the other hand G \/ K is irreducible with K non-semisimple, the compact group G must be simple and K of maximal rank. From the theorem of Borel and de Siebenthal, the involution \u03c3 is inner and K is the centralizer of a torus S. It follows that G \/ K is simply connected and there is a parabolic subgroup P in the complexification GC of G such that G \/ K = GC \/ P. In particular there is a complex structure on G \/ K and the action of G is holomorphic.\n\nIn general any compact hermitian symmetric space is simply connected and can be written as a direct product of irreducible hermitian symmetric spaces Gi \/ Ki with Gi simple. The irreducible ones are exactly the non-semisimple cases described above.[18]\n\n## Notes\n\n1. ^ Helgason 1978\n2. ^ Wolf 2010\n3. ^ See:\n4. ^ Wolf 2010\n5. ^ Wolf, p.\u00a0276\n6. ^ See:\n7. ^ Kane 2001, pp.\u00a0135\u2013136\n8. ^ Kane 2007\n9. ^ Wolf 2010\n10. ^ See:\n11. ^ See:\n12. ^ See:\n13. ^ Helgason 1978, pp.\u00a0320\u2013321\n14. ^ See:\n15. ^ Wolf 2010\n16. ^ Kobayashi & Nomizu 1996, pp.\u00a0149\u2013150\n17. ^ Kobayashi & Nomizu 1996, pp.\u00a0261\u2013262\n18. ^ Wolf 2010","date":"2014-07-13 18:21:38","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 74, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.877277135848999, \"perplexity\": 510.9294761689721}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 20, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2014-23\/segments\/1404776438441.49\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20140707234038-00044-ip-10-180-212-248.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
{"url":"http:\/\/mathematica.stackexchange.com\/questions?page=7&sort=newest","text":"# All Questions\n\n36 views\n\n### Entering a system of differential equations [closed]\n\nwhile trying to solve a the following system of differntial equations i ran in to some trouble. I browsed the web and this site to find out how to enter this but I could not manage to get it to work. ...\n110 views\n\n### Missing V9 Menu: File -> New -> FreeCDF\n\nI can run CDFs fine, and can export Notebooks as CDFs. But the File -> New menu does not contain a FreeCDF option, just the ...\n66 views\n\n76 views\n\n### How to fit exponential function which is not converging\n\nI performed an experiment where I measured diffusion in a lipid bilayer. I performed the measurement by fluorescently labeling some molecules in the bilayer, and the irradiating them with light ...\n46 views\n\n### How can I get the functionality of a command ReplaceAllList?\n\nI'm trying to use ReplaceList to match subexpressions. I expected the command: ReplaceList[{p, {p, p}}, {x_, y_} -> x y] to output two results, equivalent to: ...","date":"2014-04-17 15:59:01","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.6758191585540771, \"perplexity\": 2970.0070419481394}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2014-15\/segments\/1397609530136.5\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20140416005210-00030-ip-10-147-4-33.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Ву́лиця Миха́йла Омеляно́вича-Павле́нка — вулиця в Печерському районі міста Києва, місцевість Печерськ. Пролягає від площі Слави до вулиці Князів Острозьких.
Прилучаються вулиці Івана Мазепи, Лаврська, Бутишів провулок, Левандовська вулиця, провулки Хрестовий та Іподромний.
Історія
Вулиця виникла в 1-й половині XIX століття, мала назву Еспланадна, від розташованої поблизу еспланади Старої Печерської фортеці.
У 1885 році з непарної сторони вулиці був облаштований іподром. У 1915-1916 роках було споруджено саму будівлю іподрому, яка збереглася до сьогодні. А на місці самого іподрому зараз знаходиться житловий масив.
1886 року на розі вулиць Микільської та Еспланадної, 1/18, за проектом архітектора Миколи Чекмарьова, було завершено будівництво Києво-Печерської гімназії, з елементами «російського стилю». Про колишню гімназію нагадує бюстик Олександра Пушкіна, встановлений на площі перед будинком 1899 року коштом викладачів та учнів, з нагоди 100-річчя поета.
У 1901 році вулиця набула назву Суворовська, на честь російського військового діяча генералісімуса Олександра Суворова.
З 1919 року — вулиця Урбановича, на честь київського профспілкового діяча, розстріляного на Володимирській гірці в другій половині жовтня 1918 року.
1944 року вулиці знову повернуто попередню назву Суворовська, уточнена назва вулиця Суворова — з 1977 року.
Сучасна назва на честь українського військового діяча, генерал-полковника Армії УНР Михайла Омеляновича-Павленка — з 2016 року.
До 1998 року на вулиці діяв трамвайний рух. Трамвайний маршрут сполучав Палац спорту та Лівий берег. На даний час маршрут трамваю повторює автобус №55.
Житлова забудова
Майже всі житлові будинки по вулиці розташовані на непарному боці вулиці являють собою мікрорайон, зведений на місці колишнього іподрому. Проект мікрорайону, підготовлений у 1975 році, передбачав створення мікрорайону площею 9,8 га, який складався з п'яти 9-поверхових будинків, двох секційних 13-поверхових будинків та одного 16-поверхового будинку.
Пам'ятки історії та архітектури
№ 14/12 — житловий будинок початок XX століття.
№ 9 — головний корпус колишнього міського іподрому. Зведений у 1915–1916 роках архітектором Валеріяном Риковим; автор скульптур Федір Балавенський.
Коло будинку № 14/12 росте дуб віком близько 200 років, висота 20 м, обіймище 3,70 м. Охороняється державою з 1976 року.
Пам'ятники та меморіальні дошки
Меморіальна дошка Юрію Даденкову (буд. № 1/20). Відкрито в 1996 році. Бронза, граніт; барельєф; скульптор Микола Білик.
Меморіальна дошка Євгенові Гуцалу (буд. № 3). Відкрито 6 серпня 1998 року; бронза, мармур.
Меморіальна дошка Володимиру Поляченку (буд. № 4/6). Відкрито 9 серпня 2012 року; бронза.
Меморіальна дошка Андрієві Штогаренку (буд. № 11). Відкрито 1 липня 2008 року. Граніт; барельєф
Меморіальна дошка Євгену Березняку (буд. № 11). Відкрито 25 лютого 2016 року. Бронза; барельєф
Меморіальна дошка Вадимові Гетьману (буд. № 13).
Меморіальна дошка Олегові Ситнику (буд. № 19-А). Відкрито 5 травня 2009 року. Скульптор Володимир Іваненко, архітектор Олег Стукалов.
З 1976 по 27 травня 2015 року на території нинішнього Латвійського скверу перед буд. № 2 знаходився пам'ятник Андрію Іванову (скульптор Макар Вронський, архітектор Василь Гнєздилов).
Установи та заклади
Національний транспортний університет (буд. № 1)
Літфонд Національної спілки письменників України (буд. № 3)
Штаб-квартира ПрАТ "Київміськбуд" та почесне консульство Чилі (буд. № 4/6)
Президія Національної академії аграрних наук України та Державне підприємство «Кримський дім» (буд. 9)
Посольство Бразилії (буд. № 14/12)
Печерська районна в місті Києві державна адміністрація (буд. № 15)
Зображення
Примітки
Джерела
Київпроект: 70 років: монография / Авт.-упоряд. Кальницький М. Б., Суворов В. А.; за заг. ред. Гордєєва І. П. та ін. — : А+С, 2007. — 247 с.: фотоіл. — ISBN 966-8613-30-9.
Машкевич С. В. Улицы Киева. Ретропутешествие. — Харьков : Фолио, 2015. — 315 с. : фото. — ISBN 978-966-03-7184-2.
Вулиці Печерського району Києва
Вулиці Києва, названі на честь людей | {
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Cutting edge innovation is at the heart of every Diamond bow, and with the new Edge SB-1, archers can have the leader in ease of use, versatility, and adjustability.
This bow is designed for the beginning archer looking to experience the thrill of hitting the bullseye, as well as the seasoned archer seeking the largest game.
Adjustability and versatility are key, and the Diamond Edge SB-1 makes it a breeze.
The Edge SB-1 features 63 lbs of limb adjustment and the EZ Adjust pocket system makes setting it anywhere in between a snap.
The adjustability doesn't stop there, Rotating Modules allow for 15 inches of draw length, sure to fit almost every archer. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
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// Copyright 2014 Foursquare Labs Inc. All Rights Reserved.
package io.fsq.common.scala
/**
* Wrapper for lazy vals used within methods. lazy vals in methods synchronize
* on the object instance, not in the scope of the method. Thus multiple threads
* can block on evaluating the same lazy val in the method.
*
* <b>ALWAYS USE THIS IF YOU WANT TO USE A lazy val IN A METHOD</b>, e.g.
*
* <tt>
* def myLazilyEvaluatedFunc(..) = {..}
* val l = LazyLocal(myLazilyEvaluatedFunc)
* ...
* l.value
* </tt>
*/
class LazyLocal[T](f: => T) {
lazy val value: T = f
}
object LazyLocal {
def apply[T](f: => T) = {
new LazyLocal(f)
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 7,902 |
{"url":"http:\/\/math.stackexchange.com\/questions\/214502\/pde-maximum-principle-periodic-boundary-conditions-constant","text":"# PDE: Maximum principle + Periodic Boundary Conditions = Constant?\n\nI'm working on a homework assignment in PDE, and I'm required to use the maximum principle to demonstrate that when $\\Delta u(x)=0$ and periodic boundary conditions are applied, $u(x)$ is a constant.\n\nThe EXACT wording of the question is: \"Let u be harmonic with periodic boundary conditions. Use the maximum principle to show that u is constant.\"\n\nThe maximum principle, as written in my textbook, comes in three parts:\n\n1) Strong max: Let $u$ be harmonic in $\\Omega$. If there exists $x_0$ $\\epsilon$ $\\Omega$ with $u(x_0)=\\sup(u(x):x$ $\\epsilon$ $\\Omega)$ or $u(x_0)=\\inf(u(x):x$ $\\epsilon$ $\\Omega)$, then $u$ is constant on $\\Omega$.\n\nAlternatively, using the ball mean property, $$u(x)=constant$$ iff $$u(x_o)=\\frac{1}{\\omega_d r^d}\\int_{B(x_o,r)}u(x)dx = sup(u(x)),x\\in \\Omega$$\n\nWhere B is the ball: $$B(x,r):={y\\in R^d:|x-y|\\le r}$$\n\n2) Weak max: Let $\\Omega$ be bounded and $u$ $\\epsilon$ $C^0(\\Omega \\cup \\partial\\Omega)$ be harmonic. Then for all $x$ $\\epsilon$ $\\Omega$, $\\min(u(y):y$ $\\epsilon$ $\\partial\\Omega) \\le u(x)\\le \\max(u(y):y$ $\\epsilon$ $\\partial\\Omega)$\n\n3) Translational Corollary: Let $x_0$ $\\epsilon$ $\\Omega\\subset R^d(d\\ge 2),$ $u:\\Omega\\backslash {x_0}\\rightarrow R$ be harmonic and bounded. Then u can be extended as a harmonic function on all of $\\Omega$; i.e., there exists a harmonic function $\\tilde{u}:\\Omega\\rightarrow R$ that coincides with u on $\\Omega\\backslash {x_0}$\n\nPeriodic boundary conditions are defined as follows:\n\n$$\\Omega=(0,L_1)\\times ...\\times (0,L_n)\\subset R^n$$ and, for $$u:\\bar{\\Omega}\\rightarrow R$$ that: $$u(x_1,...,x_{i-1},L_i,x_{i+1},...,x_n)=u(x_1,...,x_{i-1},0,x_{i+1},...,x_n)$$ for all $$x=(x_1,...x_n)\\in\\Omega,i=1,...,n$$\n\nSo far, I have written the following \"true\" (as best as I can tell) statements...but I can't see why they require $u(x)$ to be constant:\n\ni) $\\Delta u(x)=0$ iff $u(x_0)=\\frac{1}{\\omega_d r^r}\\int_{B(x_0,r)}u(x)dx$\n\nii) $u(x)=constant$ iff $u(x_0)=\\sup_{\\Omega}(u(x))$\n\niii) if $\\frac{1}{\\omega_d r^d}\\int_{B(x_0,r)}u(x)dx=\\sup_{\\Omega}(u(x))$ then $u(x)=constant$\n\niv) By periodic boundary conditions, (and using the domain for the un-extended $\\Omega$ from earlier), $$u(x_0)=\\frac{1}{\\omega_d r^d}\\int_{B(x_0 + nL,r)}u(x+nL)dx$$\n\nWhere $n\\in Z^d$, and $nL=(n_1*L_1,...,n_d*L_d)$\n\n**Note: $\\omega_d$ is the volume of the unit sphere in $d$-dimensions\n\n-\nCould you maybe give the exact exercise statement and definitions for what is involved? It seems the claim you have written down above is simply wrong: Let $u(x,y) = (e^x + e^{-x})\\sin(y)$. Then clearly $u(1,y) = u(-1,y)$, $u(x,0) = u(x,2\\pi)$, and also $\\Delta u = 0$. But $u$ is not constant... (Take $\\Omega = (-1,1)\\times (0,2\\pi)$) \u2013\u00a0 Sam Oct 16 '12 at 0:58\nThe exact wording of the question is: Let u be harmonic with periodic boundary conditions. Use the maximum principle to show that u is constant. Jurgen Jost: Partial Differential Equations, 2nd Edition, pg 31. \u2013\u00a0 Chris Donlan Oct 16 '12 at 1:02\nAlso, I provided the definitions. \u2013\u00a0 Chris Donlan Oct 16 '12 at 1:06\nAlso, ran into some stuff on the internet that suggest that the only periodic solution to the Laplace equation ($\\Delta=\\bigtriangledown^2$) is $\\phi(x)=constant$...which would be exactly what this thing is asking me to demonstrate...but I don't see how the maximum principle is getting me there... \u2013\u00a0 Chris Donlan Oct 16 '12 at 1:25\nI'm thinking your definition of 'periodic boundary conditions' might be wrong. \u2013\u00a0 Sam Oct 16 '12 at 3:19\n\nThe way I see it, the book asks you to prove the following statement:\n\nSuppose $u$ is a harmonic function on $\\mathbb R^d$, satisfying $u(x+z) = u(x)$ for all $x\\in \\mathbb R^d$ and $z\\in \\mathbb Z^d$. Then $u$ is constant.\n\nThis statement is true. The 'periodic boundary condition' seems to implicitly assume that $u$ can be periodically extended to $\\mathbb R^d$, preserving a certain amount of regularity. And not only continuity, but such that the extended function is still $C^2$, I would guess.\n\nThe function $u(x,y) = (e^x + e^{-x})\\sin(y)$ on $\\Omega = (-1,1)\\times (0,2\\pi)$ admits a continuous extension to $\\mathbb R^2$ and is harmonic on $\\Omega$, but is not constant. So the extension needs to be smooth enough for the statement to hold. This is where my guess regarding the precise meaning of 'periodic boundary conditions' comes from (also this would describe the situation on a torus).\n\n-\nOK, awesome, Thanks. I will factor that in and see what the professor says...It sounds like what he said, actually...and I asked one of the guys in my class, and he said something about being confused about the \"extension\" part. \u2013\u00a0 Chris Donlan Oct 16 '12 at 4:34\nCan't vote it up though, till I get to +15 rep. \u2013\u00a0 Chris Donlan Oct 16 '12 at 4:41\n@ChristopherDonlan, you really ought to work very hard on solving this a number of different ways in one dimension, then see what you can do in $\\mathbb R^2.$ Can you show that a function $f(x)$ in one real variable, continuous on a closed interval with the same beginning and ending value, but with $f''(x) = 0$ within the open interval, must be constant? \u2013\u00a0 Will Jagy Oct 16 '12 at 4:49\nLOL. Getting there. There must be a interior maximum or minimum such that $f'(x)=0$ in order for $f(a)=f(b)$...and, in order for $f''(x)=0$, the rest of the values in between the critical point $f'(x)=0$ and $a$ and $b$, they must be either constant or zero... But if they are non-zero constants, then continuity is broken at the point $f'(x)=0$ and therefore they must be zero, making $f(x)=constant$. \u2013\u00a0 Chris Donlan Oct 16 '12 at 5:03\n@ChristopherDonlan: The 1-dimensional case might be misleading. The space of \"harmonic\" functions (I don't even feel comfortable describing them by the same name as their higher-dimensional cousins) on the real line is very simple, but this dramatically changes in dimensions $>1$. \u2013\u00a0 Sam Oct 16 '12 at 5:32","date":"2015-08-04 01:55:38","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.8568159937858582, \"perplexity\": 231.0826810762309}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2015-32\/segments\/1438042990177.43\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20150728002310-00256-ip-10-236-191-2.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Hammars glasbruk i Hammar utanför Askersund startade 1854 av och lades ner 1992.
Historia
Bruket köptes på 1960-talet av AB Plåtmanufaktur (PLM) i Malmö. PLM under Knut Laurins ledning köpte vid samma tid upp Surte glasbruk, Årnäs glasbruk och Limmareds glasbruk. Divisionsledningen för PLM-koncernens glasbruk placerades i Surte. I den nya divisionen delades tillverkningen upp mellan bruken och de fick specialisera sig inom olika tillverkningsområden.
Glasbruket genomgick flera ägarbyten. Glasbruket producerade buteljer av olika slag, allt från vin, öl, Semper och spritflaskor. Den mest kända produkten torde vara Absolut som producerades ända fram till nedläggningen då produktionen koncentrerades till Limmareds glasbruk. Här tillverkades den allra första Absolut Vodka-flaskan 1979.
Återvinning
PLM Hammars Glasbruk var också pionjär inom återvinningen. Redan innan Svensk Glasåtervinning grundades 1986 samlades returglas från glasigloos i landet in för återvinning till ny glasmassa. Svensk Glasåtervinning fortsatte verksamheten även efter glasbrukets nedläggning.
Referenser
Ej längre existerande svenska glasbruk
Företag bildade 1854
Företag upplösta 1992 | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 3,508 |
"""Give framework lots primary keys
Revision ID: 520
Revises: 510
Create Date: 2016-01-26 11:28:21.265740
"""
# revision identifiers, used by Alembic.
revision = '520'
down_revision = '510'
from alembic import op
import sqlalchemy as sa
def upgrade():
op.create_primary_key("framework_lots_pkey", "framework_lots", ["framework_id", "lot_id"])
def downgrade():
op.drop_constraint("framework_lots_pkey", "framework_lots")
| {
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\section{Introduction}
Caching, a technique playing a crucial role in combatting the peak hour network traffic congestion, receives increasing attention recently. A natural way to reduce peak hour traffic is to duplicate some contents at the end users. In the literature, there are several works focusing on investigating how to duplicate fractions of files at end users so that the peak rate is minimized and network congestion is reduced. Usually, caching works in two phases. One is the placement phase, which is performed during off-peak times. The other is the delivery phase, performed during rush hours when network resources are scarce. The general model with caching strategy were discussed in \cite{dowdy1982file}-\cite{kol2011demand} where no coding strategy was applied and the gain comes only from local duplication. However, if each user is equipped with a cache with a small size compared with the amount of the content in the server, this gain is readily observed to be negligible.
In \cite{kol2011index}, the index coding strategy was discussed. In \cite{niesen2014fundamental}, a new coded caching strategy from an information-theoretic perspective was proposed to achieve a new achievable rate region for general scenarios, where some finite rate-cache pairs were firstly derived and then the lower convex envelope of these points is shown to be achievable by memory sharing. This strategy was shown to enjoy both the local gain from duplication as well as the global gain from coding.
This fundamental idea was then extended to \cite{niesen2014decentralized} where a decentralized coded caching algorithm was presented and to \cite{niesen2014nonuniform} where the non-uniform demand scenario was investigated. In \cite{clancy2014secure}, the secure issue with coded caching was investigated.
In this work, however, we investigate the fundamental achievable rate for a special case where all users are equipped with a cache of a small size. In this case, appropriate coded duplication of contents is essential to reduce the delivery rates.
To this end, we introduce a new coded caching strategy and it is shown that the rate of this strategy coincides with the lower cut-set bound when the cache size is rather small. With memory sharing, it is shown that our strategy outperforms the strategy proposed in \cite{niesen2014fundamental} in terms of achievable delivery rates when the cache size is relatively small.
\section{Problem Setting}
A system consisting of one server and $K$ users is considered. An error-free link is assumed to be shared by all users connecting the server, where $N$ files are stored for fetching. We also assume that each user is equipped with a cache of size $Z_k$ ($k=1, \ldots, K $) and each user is assumed to request only one full file. The aim is to design a novel coded strategy to achieve a lower peak rate that can guarantee each user obtaining the file requested, compared with the recent results on caching problems in \cite{niesen2014fundamental}. In this work, we turn our interest on the special case that all users are with small buffer sizes ($Z_k \le 1/K $) and $K \ge N$, i.e., the amount of users is no smaller than that of the files in the server.
For clarity, we denote the smallest peak rate achieved by our strategy
by $R(M)$, i.e., the cache-rate pair ($M$,$R(M)$) is on the boundary of the achievable region, where $M$ denotes the cache size of all users. For comparison,
we denote the minimum peak rate achieved in
\cite{niesen2014fundamental} by $R_c(M)$
and the lower cut-set bound by $R^*(M)$.
\section{Main Results}
\begin{thm} \label{thm:1}
For $N \in \mathbb{N}$ files and $K$ ($K = N$) users each with cache of size $M=1/N$,
the cache-rate pair ($1/N,N-1$) is achievable. Furthermore, if $M \in [0,1/N]$,
\begin{align}
R(M) \le N(1-M)
\end{align}
is achievable.
\end{thm}
\begin{thm} \label{thm:2}
For $N \in \mathbb{N}$ files and $K$ ($K \in \mathbb{N}$ and $K>N$) users each with cache of size $M=1/K$,
the cache-rate pair ($1/K,N-N/K$) is achievable. Furthermore, if $M \in [0,1/K]$,
\begin{align}
R(M) \le N(1-M)
\end{align}
is achievable.
\end{thm}
\begin{thm} \label{thm:3}
For $N \in \mathbb{N}$ files and $K$ ($K=N$) users each with cache of size $M \le 1/N$, the achievable rate coincides with the associated cut-set bound.
\end{thm}
\begin{thm} \label{thm:4}
For $N \in \mathbb{N}$ files and $K$ ($K \in \mathbb{N}$ and $K>N$) users each with cache of size $M \le 1/K$, the achievable rate coincides with the associated cut-set bound.
\end{thm}
Note that in \cite{niesen2014fundamental}, the achievable rate with
$M=1/K$ is on the line connecting the two cache-rate pair points ($0,N$) and the first non-trivial point ($N/K, \min\left((K-1)/2,N(K-1)/K \right)$)\footnote{Note that in \cite{niesen2014fundamental} only rates of a number of points with cache size of $tN/K$ ($t=0,\ldots,N$) are directly derived and then the achievable cache-rate region is determined by the lower convex envelope of these points. It is readily observed that the non-trivial direct-derived achievable point with the smallest cache size is hence the point with cache size $N/K$.} and is hence given by,
\begin{align}
R_c(\frac{1}{K})= &\frac{\min \left(\frac{K(K-1)}{2},N(K-1) \right)-KN}{N} \cdot \frac{1}{K}+N \label{eq:proof:compare_0} \\
&=N-1 + \min(\frac{K-1}{2N},1-\frac{1}{K}) \label{eq:proof:compare_1}\\
&\geq N-1 + \min(\frac{N-1}{2N},1-\frac{1}{N}) \label{eq:proof:compare_2}\\
&= N - \max \left( \frac{N+1}{2N}, 1/N \right) \\
&\ge N-\frac{K}{N} =R(\frac{1}{K}). \label{eq:proof:compare_3}
\end{align}
where the inequalities in (\ref{eq:proof:compare_2}) and (\ref{eq:proof:compare_3}) follow from the setting that $K \ge N \ge 1$.
Note also that the inequality in (\ref{eq:proof:compare_3}) strictly holds as long as $N>1$, which demonstrates the gain achieved by our coding strategy over the strategy designed in \cite{niesen2014fundamental} for the small cache size scenario.
Furthermore, with our coding strategy, we have
\begin{align}
R(1/K)&=N(1-1/K) \\
&= \min\left(\frac{K-1}{2},\frac{N(K-1)}{K} \right), \quad \mbox{if $K \ge 2N$}\nonumber\\
&=R_c(N/K), \quad \mbox{if $K \ge 2N$.} \nonumber
\end{align}
Which is an encouraging result. In other words, with a smaller cache size $M=1/K$, the designed coding strategy can achieve a rate no smaller than that in \cite{niesen2014fundamental} with the cache size $M=N/K$ if $K \ge 2N$.
Therefore, compared with \cite{niesen2014fundamental}, the rate with the
cache size of $M<N/K$ is improved by our results through memory sharing,
where the exact expression of the achievable rate with $0 \leq M \leq N/K$ is given on top of next page.
\section{Examples}
{\bf Example 1.} In this example, we set $N=K=3$, i.e., a system consists of three files in the server and three intended users. Let $W_1=A$, $W_2=B$ and $W_3=C$. We would like to show that
the $(M,R)$ pair ($1/3, 2$) is achievable.
With cache size $M=1/3$, we split each file into three subfiles with equal size, i.e., $A=(A_1,A_2,A_3)$, $B=(B_1,B_2,B_3)$ and $C=(C_1,C_2,C_3)$.
In the placement phase, the cache content of user $k$ is designed to be $Z_k=(A_k \oplus B_k \oplus C_k)$, which is an XORed version of three subfiles from different files in the server.
In the delivery phase, let us consider an example that user 1 requires $A$, user $2$ requires $B$ an user $3$ requires $C$. Hence, to obtain
the missing files for user 1, we should transmit $B_1$ and $C_1$ to obtain $A_1$ from the XORed subfile in $Z_1$ as well as $A_2$ and $A_3$ for the missing files of
$A$. In a similar manner, for user 2 requesting file $B$, the server need to transmit $B_3$ for the missing part of $B$ ($B_1$ is obtained from the shared link satisfying user 1). In addition, the server transmits
$C_2$ to obtain $B_2$ (as $A_2$ has been transmitted and received by user 2).
Note that the server has satisfied user 3 since the missing subfiles
$C_1$ and $C_2$ are already received by it. In addition, with the received
$A_3$ and $B_3$ from the shared link user $3$ can obtain $C_3$ from the cached $A_3 \oplus B_3 \oplus C_3$.
Therefore, the server has to transmit ($B_1$, $C_1$, $A_2$, $A_3$, $B_3$, $C_2$) to satisfy the requests of all users in this example. In a similar manner, all other requests can be satisfied.
Since each subfile has rate $1/3$, the total rate $2$ is achievable.
On the other hand, the cut set bound derived in \cite{niesen2014fundamental} indicates the minimum rate is $R^*(1/3)=3-3/3=2$ and is identical to the achievable rate. By cache sharing, we conclude that the achievable rate coincides with the cut set bound if $0 \leq M \leq 1/N$.
{\bf Example 2.} In this example, we consider a system with a server of $4$ files and $4$ users, i.e., $N=K=4$. The four files are termed as $W_1=A$, $W_2=B$, $W_3=C$ and $W_4=D$.
Consider the case with the cache size $M=1/4$. In this example, we split each file into four parts of equal size, i.e., $A=(A_1,A_2,A_3,A_4)$, $B=(B_1,B_2,B_3,B_4)$, $C=(C_1,C_2,C_3,C_4)$ and $D=(D_1,D_2,D_3,D_4)$.
In the placement phase, we let user $i$ caches the XORed subfile $Z_k=(A_k \oplus B_k \oplus C_k \oplus D_k)$.
In the delivery phase, for instance, consider that user $i$ requires $W_i$, i.e., user 1 requests A, user 2 requests B, user 3 requests C and user 4 requests D. We can satisfy all requests of different users by sending
($A_2$, $A_3$, $A_4$, $B_1$, $B_3$, $B_4$, $C_1$, $C_2$, $C_4$, $D_1$, $D_2$, $D_3$). It is observed that with this transmission subfile list, all missing subfiles can be received by intended users. In addition, it is readily verified that the intended subfile which is XORed in the cache of each user is also obtained by XORing the three other XORed subfiles. For example, for user 1, it receives $B_1$, $C_1$ and $D_1$, hence $A_1$ is also fetched by
$(A_1 \oplus B_1 \oplus C_1 \oplus D_1) \oplus B_1 \oplus C_1 \oplus D_1$. In a similar manner, user 2, user 3 and user 4 can also obtain $B_2$, $C_3$ and $D_4$ respectively. Therefore, by sending these subfiles, all user requests are satisfied with rate $3$, as the rate of each subfile is $1/4$.
Similarly, we can realize any possible requests with rate $3$ with the cache size $M=1/4$. Hence, the cache-rate pair ($1/4$, $3$) is achievable and can be verified to coincide with the cut-set bound, which is $R^*(1/4)=4-4 \cdot 1/4=3$. Therefore the cut-set bound is achievable if $0\leq M \leq 1/4$.
Akin to \textbf{Example 1 and 2}, the cache-rate pair ($1/N$,$N-1$) is achievable for an arbitrary number of files $N$ in the server with the same number of users as that of the files in the server, i.e., $K=N$. The proof for this general case is left to the next section.
{\bf Example 3.} Consider a system with $N=3$ files and $K=4$ users.
We term each file as $W_1=A$, $W_2=B$ and $W_3=C$.
Consider the case with cache size $M=1/4$. We split each file into 12 parts of equal size, i.e., $A=(A_1,\cdots,A_{12})$, $B=(B_1,\cdots,B_{12})$ and $C=(C_1,\cdots,C_{12})$. Each cache can therefore store three subfiles.
In the placement phase, we let user $i$ caches the three XORed subfiles as
$$Z_i=(A_{3(i-1)+j} \oplus B_{3(i-1)+j} \oplus C_{3(i-1)+j}), \quad j=1,2,3.$$
Hence one user caches 9 exclusive subfiles in an XORed version and any subfiles partitioned in the server can be found in the cache of one and only one user.
In the transmissions phase, let us assume that user $1$ needs $A$, user $2$ needs $B$, user $3$ needs $C$ and user $4$ needs $A$.
To fully exploit the coded caching strategy, we then delivery the subfiles ($B_1$, $C_1$, $B_2$, $C_2$, $B_3$, $C_3$) for user 1 to XOR $A_1$, $A_2$ and $A_3$.
By delivering of these subfiles, $B_1$, $B_2$ are received by user $2$ and $C_1$, $C_2$ are received by user $3$. Similarly, we deliver ($A_4$, $C_4$, $A_5$, $C_5$, $A_6$, $C_6$) for user 2 to obtain $B_4$, $B_5$ and $B_6$.
($A_7$, $B_7$, $A_8$, $B_8$, $A_9$, $B_9$) for user 3 to obtain $C_7$, $C_8$ and $C_9$. ($B_{10}$, $C_{10}$, $B_{11}$, $C_{11}$, $B_{12}$, $C_{12}$) for user 4 to obtain $A_{10}$, $A_{11}$ and $A_{12}$.
Hence, by delivering these $24$ subfiles, user $2$ receive the complete file $B$ and user $3$ receive the entire file $C$. However, user 1 still lacks the subfiles ($A_{10}$, $A_{11}$, $A_{12}$) and user 4 is in need of the subfiles ($A_1$, $A_2$, $A_3$). To exploit the side information at the caches, we hence delivery ($A_1 \oplus A_{10}$, $A_2 \oplus A_{11}$ and $A_3 \oplus A_{12}$). By doing so, we can fulfil the requests of all users with delivery of 27 subfiles, i.e., rate $R(1/4)=27/12=9/4$ is achievable for this case. Similarly, it can be readily shown that this rate is achievable for any other possible requests.
It is worth pointing out that, the cut-set bound at the point $M=1/4$ is $R^*(1/4)=3-3/4=9/4$ and identical to the achievable rate $R(1/4)$. Thanks to cache sharing, the cut-set bound is therefore achievable in the interval $M \in [0,1/4]$ in this example.
{\bf Example 4}. Consider the case of a server with $3$ files and 5 users.
We term each file as $W_1=A$, $W_2=B$ and $W_3=C$.
Consider the case with cache size $M=1/5$. We split each file into $3 \times 5=15$ parts of equal size, i.e., $A=(A_1,\cdots,A_{15})$, $B=(B_1,\cdots,B_{15})$ and $C=(C_1,\cdots,C_{15})$ and each cache can store three subfiles.
In the placement phase, we let user $i$ caches the three XORed subfiles as
$$Z_i=(A_{3(i-1)+j} \oplus B_{3(i-1)+j} \oplus C_{3(i-1)+j}), \quad j=1,2,3.$$
Each user then stores $9$ exclusive subfiles in an XORed version and each subfile can be found
in the cache of one and only one user.
In the transmissions phase, let us assume that user $1$ needs $A$, user $2$ needs $B$, user $3$ needs $C$, user $4$ needs $A$ and user $5$ requests $B$.
Similar to {\bf Example 3}, we deliver the subfile list ($B_1$, $C_1$, $B_2$, $C_2$, $B_3$, $C_3$) for user 1 to XOR $A_1$, $A_2$ and $A_3$,
Therefore $B_1$, $B_2$ are received by user $2$ and user $5$, while $C_1$ and $C_2$ are received by user 3. Similarly, we deliver ($A_4$, $C_4$, $A_5$, $C_5$, $A_6$, $C_6$) for user 2 to obtain $B_4$, $B_5$ and $B_6$;
($A_7$, $B_7$, $A_8$, $B_8$, $A_9$, $B_9$) for user 3 to obtain $C_7$, $C_8$ and $C_9$; ($B_{10}$, $C_{10}$, $B_{11}$, $C_{11}$, $B_{12}$, $C_{12}$) for user 4 to obtain $A_{10}$, $A_{11}$ and $A_{12}$; ($A_{13}$, $C_{13}$, $A_{14}$, $C_{14}$, $A_{15}$, $C_{15}$) for user $5$ to obtain $B_{13}$, $B_{14}$ and $B_{15}$.
Hence, by delivering these $30$ subfiles, user $3$ receive the entire file $C$. However, user $1$ still requests the subfiles ($A_{10}$, $A_{11}$, $A_{12}$), user $2$ requests ($B_{10}$, $B_{11}$, $B_{12}$), user $4$ requests ($A_1$, $A_2$, $A_3$) and user $5$ requests ($B_{4}$, $B_{5}$, $B_{6}$).
To exploit the side information at the caches, we can delivery the XORed version of the subfiles, i.e., ($A_1 \oplus A_{10}$, $A_2 \oplus A_{11}$, $A_3 \oplus A_{12}$, $B_{11} \oplus B_{5}$ and $B_{12} \oplus B_{6}$). With this coded transmission, all intended users can completely obtain the subfiles requested.
We therefore fulfil the requests of all users by delivery of only 36 subfiles, i.e., rate $R(1/5)=36/15=12/5$ is achievable for this case.
In a similar manner, it can be readily shown that this rate is achievable for any possible requests.
It is worth pointing out that, the cut-set bound at the point $M=1/5$ is $R^*(1/5)=3-3/5=12/5$ and equals the achievable rate $R(1/5)$. By memory sharing, the cut-set bound is therefore achievable in the interval $M \in [0,1/5]$ in this example.
\section{Proof Of Theorems }
We now present the achievable scheme for an arbitrary number of users with $K \ge N$. We shall show that with the cache size of $M \leq 1/\max(N,K)$, the delivery rates presented in Theorem \ref{thm:1}-\ref{thm:2} are achievable and the cut-set bound is met for such points with cache size $M \leq 1/\max(N,K)$.
\subsection{Proof of Theorem 1}
Here we prove Theorem 1 for the case with an equal number of files and users, i.e., $N=K$. We prove it in two folds. Firstly, we verify that the point ($1/N$,$N-1$) is achievable by a constructed coded caching scheme. Secondly, we show that any points with $M<1/N$ can achieve a rate of $N-NM$ by memory sharing.
Let us define the files as $W_i$ ($i=1,\ldots,N$) and split each file into $N$ subfiles, i.e., $W_i=(W_{i1}, \ldots, W_{iN})$. In the placement phase, the cache of user $j$ is designed to be $Z_j = W_{1j} \otimes \ldots \otimes W_{Nj}$, an XORed version of subfiles, which contains one and only one subfile from all files. With this coded placement scheme, each user caches some exclusive part of all files.
In the delivery phase, if the users request $L \leq N-1$ files, we can simply transmit these requested files and the delivery rate is $L$ files. We then move to the case that the users request $N$ files, i.e., each user requests a different file. Due to symmetry, we only need to study the case that user $i$ requests file $W_i$. The transmission algorithm is therefore presented as follows.
\begin{itemize}
\item For the first file, we transmit the subfiles $W_{12}$, $\ldots$, $W_{1N}$.
\item For the $i$th ($1<i<N$) file, we transmit the subfiles $W_{i,1}$, $\ldots$, $W_{i,i-1}$, $W_{i,i+1}$, $\ldots$, $W_{1N}$.
\item For the $N$th file, we transmit the subfiles $W_{N1}$, $\ldots$, $W_{N,N-1}$.
\end{itemize}
As for each file $(N-1)/N$ fraction of it is delivered, we totally deliver $N-1$ files.
With this transmission, we argue that each user can obtain the files requested. For instance, for the $i$th user requesting $W_i$, it can obtain all subfiles except $W_{ii}$ from the delivery of $W_i$ directly. In addition, user $i$ receives
all $W_{ki}$ ($j \neq i$) subfiles from file $W_k$. Hence it can obtain the subfile $W_{ii}$ by
\begin{align}
W_{ii}=&(W_{1i} \oplus \ldots \oplus W_{Ni}) \oplus W_{1i} \oplus \ldots \oplus W_{i-1,i} \nonumber \\
&\oplus W_{i+1,i} \oplus \ldots \oplus W_{Ni} \\
=&W_{ii} \nonumber
\end{align}
Therefore, user $i$ can obtain all subfiles of $W_i$ and construct the complete file $W_i$. In a similar manner, all users can obtain the complete file requested and the cache-rate pair $(1/N,N-1)$ is hence achievable for this special case. Moreover, due to symmetry, we can conclude that the cache-rate pair $(1/N,N-1)$ is achievable for all possible requests.
On the other hand, with the two achievable points, i.e., ($0,N$) and ($1/N$,$N-1$) taken into account, we can achieve a rate of $R(M)=N(1-M)$ for the cache size $0 \le M \leq 1/N $ by memory sharing. Theorem 1 is hence proved.
\subsection{Proof of Theorem 2}
Here we prove Theorem 2 for the case with $N<K$.
The files are defined by $W_i$ ($i=1,\ldots,N$) and we split each file into $NK$ subfiles, i.e., $W_i=(W_{i,1}, \ldots, W_{i,NK})$.
In the placement phase, the cache of user $i$ is designed to
store $N$ XORed version of subfiles, which are,
$$Z_i=W_{1,N(i-1)+j} \oplus \cdots \oplus W_{N,N(i-1)+j}, \quad j=1, \ldots, N.$$
With this coded placement scheme, each user caches some exclusive part of all files and the union set of the caches comprises all $N$ files in the server.
In the delivery phase, if all users request $L$ ($L \leq N-1$) distinct files in total, we can simply transmit these requested files one by one and the total amount of files delivered is $L$ files and the associated rate is less than $N-N/K$. We then move to the case that all $N$ files are requested. Suppose
user $i$ requests the file $W_{d_i}$ and correspondingly the subfile $W_{i}$ is requested by totally $k_{i}$ users. By definition, we hence have $\sum_{i=1}^N k_{i}=K$.
The transmission procedure can be divided into two steps as follows.
\begin{enumerate}
\item In the first step, for the $i$th user requesting $W_{d_i}$, we transmit $W_{k,N(i-1)+j}$ ($k \neq d_i$ and $j=1,\ldots,N$), i.e., $(N-1)N$ subfiles in total are delivered to obtain $W_{d_i, N(i-1)+j}$ ($j=1,\ldots,N$) via coded operation.
\item In the second step, for the rest subfiles requested by users, we apply the following algorithm by firstly grouping the users requesting the same file and then applying coding strategy to reduce transmissions. The details are presented as follows.
\begin{enumerate}
\item If $W_{d_i}$ ($i=1,\ldots, K$) is solely requested by the $i$th user, all subfiles of $W_{d_i}$ can be completely received in Step 1). Hence the amount of remaining requests for $W_{d_i}$ is $0$.
\item For any $W_{i}$ requested by $k_i$ users ($k_i>1$), where each associated user requesting the residue $(k_i-1)N$ subfiles, we do
\begin{enumerate}
\item Initialization: list the users requesting $W_i$ in an ascending order with respect to their index. For simplicity, their index are correspondingly denoted by $K_l$ ($l=1, \ldots, k_i$). Observe that the exclusive subfiles obtained by user $K_l$ is $W_{i,N(K_l-1)+j}$ ($j=1,\ldots,N$) and they are requested by
the other users in the same group. Set the initial value of the counter as $u=1$.
\item If $u=1$, deliver the $N$ coded subfiles, $W_{i,N(K_1-1)+j} \oplus W_{i,N(K_2-1)+j}$ ($j=1,\ldots,N$)
and set $u \leftarrow u+1$.
\item If $u=m$ ($m<k_i-1$), deliver the $N$ coded subfiles, $W_{i,N(K_m-1)+j} \oplus W_{i,N(K_{m+1}-1)+j}$ ($j=1,\ldots,N$)
to all users requesting $W_i$, set $u \leftarrow u+1$ and go to Step iv).
\item If $u<k_i-1$ go to Step iii), otherwise terminate the delivery of subfiles of $W_i$.
\end{enumerate}
\end{enumerate}
\end{enumerate}
Note that in step 2), a) follows from two facts. The first is that the $i$th user obtains $W_{d_i, N(i-1)+j}$ ($j=1,\ldots,N$) via coded delivery. The second is that it receives directly
$W_{d_i, N(k-1)+j}$ ($k \neq i$ and $j=1,\ldots,N$) in the first step because they are delivered for other users for XORing. Therefore, the $i$th user can reconstruct the full file $W_{d_i}$ directly after Step 1).
Similarly for the case that $W_i$ is requested by more than one users ($k_i>1$) in b) of Step 2), the fact that each user requesting $W_i$ needs $(k_i-1)N$ follows also from two facts. The first is that it receives $N$ subfiles via coded delivery in Step 1). The second is that it directly receives $N(K-k_i)$ subfiles for the users requesting other files in Step 1). Therefore, only $NK-N-N(K-k_i)=N(k_i-1)$ subfiles is requested by each of the users requesting $W_i$.
In the following, we shall show that the sub-algorithm in b) in Step 2) can help all users requesting $W_i$ receive all the residue files.
Note that for user $K_m$ requesting $W_i$, it receives the subfile list
($W_{i,N(K_m-1)+j} \oplus W_{i,N(K_{m+1}-1)+j}$) ($m=1, \ldots, k_i-1$, $j=1,\ldots,N$).
It can firstly obtain $W_{i,N(K_{m-1}-1)+j}$ and $W_{i,N(K_{m+1}-1)+j}$ ($j=1,\ldots,N$) from the $m-1$th and the $m$ delivery of subfiles via XORing. It can then recursively obtain $W_{i,N(K_{m-k}-1)+j}$ ($k=2,\ldots,m-1$) and $W_{i,N(K_{m+k}-1)+j}$ ($k=2,\ldots,k_i-m$). Hence, user $K_m$ can obtain the complete file $W_i$. In a similar manner, we can verify that any other users in the same group requesting $W_i$ can receive the complete file $W_i$.
As $W_i$ is an arbitrary file in the server, we conclude that all users can obtain the requested file by our algorithm and in the following we shall derive the achievable rate for $M=1/K$ by applying the algorithm above. We first denote $C_i$ as the amount of subfiles delivered in Step i) and $n_{k_i}$ as the amount of the XORed version of subfiles delivered for $W_i$ in Step 2).
In Step 1), it is observed that the total amount of subfiles delivered is given by,
\begin{align}
C_1=(N-1)NK.
\end{align}
As designed in Step 2) for file $W_i$, the total amount of the remaining transmissions is
\begin{align}
n_{k_i}=(k_i-1)N. \label{eq:step_2_k_i}
\end{align}
Therefore, the total amount of subfiles delivered in the second step is
\begin{align}
C_2=&\sum_{i=1}^N n_{k_i}= \sum_{i=1}^N (k_i-1)N \label{eq:step_2_all_k_i_1}\\
= & \sum_{i=1}^N k_iN - N^2 = (K-N)N. \label{eq:step_2_all_k_i_2}
\end{align}
The total amount of subfile deliveries in these two steps is given by
\begin{align}
C_1+C_2=(N-1)NK+(K-N)N=(K-1)N^2.
\end{align}
The associated delivery rate therefore is
\begin{align}
R(1/K)=(K-1)N^2/NK=N-N/K>N-1
\end{align}
and we can claim that $(1/K,R(1/K))=(1/K,N(1-1/K)$ is an achievable cache-rate pair. In addition, regarding the trivial cache-rate pair $(0,N)$, for any $M \leq 1/K$, the rate pair $(M, N(1-M))$ is achievable by memory sharing. Theorem 2 is hence proved.
\subsection{Proof of Theorem 3 and Theorem 4}
Here we show that the achieved rate given in Theorem \ref{thm:3} and Theorem \ref{thm:4} for the scenario with $N \leq K$ and $M \leq 1/K$ coincides with the lower cut-set bound.
From \cite{niesen2014fundamental}, the cut-set lower bound is given by,
\begin{align}
R^*(M) \ge \max_{s\in\{ 1, \ldots, \min(N,K) \}}(s-\frac{s}{ \lfloor N/s \rfloor}M)
\end{align}
Therefore, with $M \le 1/K$, we obtain
\begin{align}
R^*(M) &\ge \max(1-\frac{M}{N}, \ldots, N-NM), \quad 0\leq M \leq \frac{1}{K} \label{eq:proof:T4_1}\\
& \ge N(1-M) \label{eq:proof:T4_2}\\
& = R(M) \label{eq:proof:T4_3}
\end{align}
where (\ref{eq:proof:T4_1}) follows directly from the cut-set bound and
(\ref{eq:proof:T4_2}) follows from the fact that $\max( \cdot )$ returns the maximum value of the elements in the brackets.
(\ref{eq:proof:T4_3}) follows directly from Theorem \ref{thm:1} and Theorem \ref{thm:2}.
From the above derivation, it is hence concluded that for the scenario $N \le K$ and $M \le 1/K$, the lower cut-set bound is achievable.
Theorem \ref{thm:3} and Theorem \ref{thm:4} are therefore verified.
\section{Conclusion}
In this work, we studied the caching problem when all users are with a small buffer size and the number of users is no less than the amount of files in the server. A novel coded caching scheme was proposed to achieve the cut-set bound rate for such a scenario.
| {
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Q: A function within a function in vba? Here is a simplified version of a function I use in a cell (=xxDay(B7) for example) to retrieve a day from a closed workbook:
Function xxDay(row)
Dim fName, Path, strSheet, strRef, strRng As Variant
xxDay = ""
Path = "C:\MMS\"
fName = "Book1.xlsm"
strSheet = "Sheet1"
strRng = Cells(row, 3).Address(, , xlR1C1)
strRef = "'" & Path & "[" & fName & "]" & strSheet & "'!" & strRng
xxDay = ExecuteExcel4Macro(strRef)
End Function
I get a #VALUE returned in the cell. I run it as Sub and it will return the expected results. Is it possible to have a function call another function within itself?
Sub SubxxDay()
Dim fName, Path, strSheet, strRef, strRng, xxDay, row As Variant
row = 7
xxDay = ""
Path = "C:\MMS\"
fName = "Book1.xlsm"
strSheet = "Sheet1"
strRng = Cells(row, 3).Address(, , xlR1C1)
strRef = "'" & Path & "[" & fName & "]" & strSheet & "'!" & strRng
xxDay = ExecuteExcel4Macro(strRef)
MsgBox xxDay
End Sub
Much appreciate any response.
A: I suggest one of possible workarounds. The approach is as follows: while UDFs are executing, ExecuteExcel4Macro() is being called as a method of late bound Excell.Application instance, but not via host Application object that would give an error. So, that instance should be created and stay accessible while workbook is opened, and be quitted to release OS resources just before workbook closing. Here is the code below.
Place this code into VBAProject Module:
Function ExcelApp()
Static objApp As New clsExcelApp
Set ExcelApp = objApp.ExcelApp
End Function
Function xxDay(row) ' the code this function contains is almost all yours
Dim fName, Path, strSheet, strRef, strRng As Variant
xxDay = ""
Path = "C:\Test\"
fName = "Source.xlsx"
strSheet = "Sheet1"
strRng = Cells(row, 3).Address(, , xlR1C1)
strRef = "'" & Path & "[" & fName & "]" & strSheet & "'!" & strRng
xxDay = ExcelApp.ExecuteExcel4Macro(strRef) ' reference to ExcelApp object
End Function
Create Class Module, assign it the name clsExcelApp, and place this code into it:
Public ExcelApp
Private Sub Class_Initialize()
Set ExcelApp = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
' ExcelApp.Visible = True ' uncomment for debug
End Sub
Private Sub Class_Terminate()
ExcelApp.Quit ' the only class purpose is to quit app anyway at the end
Set ExcelApp = Nothing
End Sub
| {
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At RBK, our HR experts will help your Credit Union comply with its obligations under employment legislation. We provide practical support to help you address HR and employee related queries.
Our Payroll service will ensure your payroll is processed in a timely and cost effective way.
We also support change management during mergers and transfers of engagements.
For more information or to discuss your specific needs, please contact a member of our team. | {
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The 2019 Ice Cold Beer Festival is set for Saturday, Feb. 9 in downtown Minocqua at Torpy Park. The outdoor festival is held under a heated tent and features fun, food, music and of course craft beer. Proceeds from the event go to the Dr. Kate Hopsice Foundation which helps families in the Lakeland area with their needs during the difficult time of death.
Tickets for the event can be purchased in three tiers; early bird tickets are all general admission and include entry to the festival from 1 to 4 p.m. There are also premier tasting tickets which get the first 200 purchasers an exclusive hour of tasting, premier food buffet and private restrooms. They are also included into a drawing for a wheel barrel of beer courtesy of the Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan beer vendors. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
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1911 (MCMXI) je bilo navadno leto, ki se je po gregorijanskem koledarju začelo na nedeljo.
Dogodki
7. januar - monaški princ Albert razglasi ustavo v odziv na proteste proti absolutistični ureditvi.
18. januar - ameriški letalec Eugene Burton Ely izvede prvi pristanek letala na ladji.
11. januar - v Berlinu je ustanovljena Družba cesarja Viljema za spodbujanje raziskav na področju naravoslovja v Nemčiji.
30. januar - izbruh ognjenika Taal na filipinskem otoku Luzon zahteva 1335 žrtev.
18. februar - prvi uradni poštni polet: pilot Henri Pequet dostavi 6500 pisemskih pošiljk med mesti Alahabad in Naini v Indiji.
7. marec - Ernest Rutherford predstavi svoj model atoma.
16. marec - uradno je ustanovljen Las Vegas.
19. marec - prva proslava za dan žena.
8. april - fizik Heike Kamerlingh Onnes z Univerze v Leidnu odkrije superprevodnost.
9. maj - ustanovljeno je Nogometno društvo Ilirija, prvi slovenski nogometni klub.
15. – 16. maj - po cestah dežele Kranjske poteka etapa dirke Alpenfahrt, prve avtomobilistične dirke na slovenskih tleh.
21. maj - mehiška revolucija: podpisano je premirje med Maderovimi uporniki in vladnimi silami pod vodstvom predsednika Porfiria Díaza.
31. maj - v Belfastu je splovljen RMS Titanic
14. junij - RMS Olympic, kot prva ladja razreda Olympic, odpluje na svojo krstno plovbo iz Southamptona v New York.
15. junij - v New Yorku je uradno združeno podjetje IBM (pod imenom Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation).
1. julij - agadirska kriza: Nemčija pošlje bojno ladjo v maroško pristanišče Agadir v odziv na francosko vojaško posredovanje, ki je v nasprotju s sporazumom med državama.
24. julij - ameriški raziskovalec Hiram Bingham odkrije Machu Picchu.
22. avgust - v pariškem Louvru odkrijejo krajo Mona Lize.
20. september - RMS Olympic ob obali otoka Wight trči v britansko vojaško ladjo HMS Hawke, kar povzroči veliko škodo na obeh ladjah.
29. september - Italija napove vojno Osmanskemu cesarstvu.
10. oktober - v kitajski provinci Hubej izbruhne upor proti oblastem, ki kasneje preraste v revolucijo in strmoglavi dinastijo Čing.
5. november - Italija priključi Tripoli in Cirenajko.
30. november - pričetek gradnje prekooceanke HMHS Britannic.
12. december - prestolnico Indije prenesejo iz Kolkate v New Delhi.
14. december - Amundsenova odprava doseže južni tečaj.
Rojstva
3. januar - Alexandros Papadiamantis, grški pisatelj in pesnik († 1851)
26. januar - Polykarp Kusch, nemško-ameriški fizik, nobelovec († 1993)
6. februar - Ronald Reagan, ameriški politik († 2004)
16. marec - Josef Mengele, nemški nacistični zdravnik († 1979)
20. marec - Alfonso García Robles, mehiški politik in diplomat, nobelovec († 1991)
26. marec:
John Langshaw Austin, angleški filozof in jezikoslovec († 1960)
Bernard Katz, nemško-britansko-avstralski nevrofiziolog in biofizik, nobelovec († 2003)
Tennessee Williams, ameriški pisatelj, dramatik in pesnik († 1983)
27. marec - Franc Rozman-Stane, slovenski partizanski komandant († 1944)
6. april - Feodor Felix Konrad Lynen, nemški biokemik, nobelovec († 1979)
8. april - Melvin Calvin, ameriški kemik, nobelovec († 1997)
15. maj - Max Frisch, švicarski pisatelj in dramatik († 1991)
4. junij - Milovan Đilas, črnogorski pesnik, pisatelj in politik († 1995)
13. junij - Luis Walter Alvarez, ameriški fizik, nobelovec († 1988)
24. junij:
Juan Manuel Fangio, argentinski dirkač Formule 1 († 1996)
Ernesto Sabato, argentinski pisatelj († 2011)
30. junij - Czesław Miłosz, poljski pisatelj, pesnik in diplomat, nobelovec († 2004)
5. julij - Georges Pompidou, francoski politik († 1974)
9. julij - John Archibald Wheeler ameriški fizik in kozmolog († 2008)
21. julij - Herbert Marshall McLuhan, kanadski literarni kritik, medijski teoretik in filozof († 1980)
27. julij - Giorgio Scerbanenco, italijanski pisatelj, novinar in scenarist († 1969)
9. avgust - William Alfred Fowler, ameriški fizik in astrofizik, nobelovec († 1995)
25. avgust - Vo Nguyen Giap, vietnamski general in politik († 2013)
19. september:
Dragotin Cvetko, slovenski muzikolog in skladatelj († 1993)
William Golding, angleški pisatelj in pesnik, nobelovec († 1993)
24. september - Konstantin Černenko, ruski politik († 1985)
14. oktober - Le Duc Tho, vietnamski general, diplomat in politik, nobelovec († 1990)
22. oktober - Kristina Brenk, slovenska pisateljica († 2009)
31. oktober - Aleksander Iljič Ahiezer, ruski fizik († 2000)
2. november - Odiseas Elitis, grški pesnik, nobelovec († 1996)
6. november - Stanislav Lenič, slovenski škof († 1991)
28. november - Nakamura Hadžime, japonski budistični filozof, indolog in prevajalec († 1999)
11. december - Nagib Mahfuz, egiptovski pisatelj, nobelovec († 2006)
23. december - Niels Kaj Jerne, danski imunolog, nobelovec († 1994)
Smrti
9. januar - Edvard Rusjan, slovenski letalec (* 1886)
17. januar - Francis Galton, angleški polihistor (* 1822)
15. februar - Theodor Escherich, nemško-avstrijski pediater (* 1857)
1. marec - Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, nizozemski kemik, nobelovec (* 1852)
10. april -
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, litovski slikar in skladatelj (* 1875)
Samuel Loyd, ameriški problemist, ugankar in razvedrilni matematik (* 1841)
18. maj - Gustav Mahler, avstrijski skladatelj in dirigent (* 1860)
1. oktober - Wilhelm Dilthey, nemški zgodovinar, sociolog, literarni teoretik in filozof (* 1833)
18. oktober - Alfred Binet, francoski psiholog (* 1857)
19. oktober - Eugene Burton Ely, ameriški letalec (* 1886)
29. oktober - Joseph Pulitzer, madžarsko-ameriški novinar in založnik (* 1847)
10. december - Joseph Dalton Hooker, britanski botanik in raziskovalec (* 1817)
21. oktober - Josip Vošnjak, slovenski politik, zdravnik in pisatelj (* 1834)
Nobelove nagrade
Fizika - Wilhelm Wien
Kemija - Maria Skłodowska-Curie
Fiziologija ali medicina - Allvar Gullstrand
Književnost - Maurice Maeterlinck
Mir - Tobias Michael Carel Asser in Alfred Hermann Fried | {
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As eleições legislativas de Israel em 1973 foram realizadas a 31 de Dezembro e serviram para eleger os 120 membros do Knesset.
A coligação de centro-esquerda Alinhamento voltou a vencer as eleições com cerca de 40% dos votos e 51 deputados. Apesar desta vitória, o partido perdeu quase 7% dos votos em relação a 1969, que se explica pela forma desastrosa como decorreu a Guerra de Yom Kippur.
Na oposição, é de destacar a forte votação do novo partido de direita Likud que obteve mais de 30% dos votos.
Após as eleições, Golda Meir formou governo com o partido religioso e os liberais, mas no ano seguinte Yitzhak Rabin substituiu Meir e formou uma nova coligação com os liberais, socialistas e minorias árabes.
Resultados Oficiais
Eleições em Israel
1973 em Israel | {
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{"url":"https:\/\/scicomp.stackexchange.com\/questions\/36306\/how-to-properly-calculate-cpu-and-gpu-flops-performance","text":"# How to properly calculate CPU and GPU FLOPS performance?\n\n## Problem\n\nI'm trying to calculate CPU \/ GPU FLOPS performance but I'm not sure if I'm doing it correctly.\n\nLet's say we have:\n\n\u2022 A Kaby Lake CPU (clock: 2.8 GHz, cores: 4, threads: 8)\n\u2022 A Pascal GPU (clock: 1.3 GHz, cores: 768).\n\nThis Wiki page says that Kaby Lake CPUs compute 32 FLOPS (single precision FP32) and Pascal cards compute 2 FLOPS (single precision FP32), which means we can compute their total FLOPS performance using the following formulas:\n\nCPU:\n\nTOTAL_FLOPS = 2.8 GHz * 4 cores * 32 FLOPS = 358 GFLOPS\n\n\nGPU:\n\nTOTAL_FLOPS = 1.3 GHz * 768 cores * 2 FLOPS = 1996 GFLOPS\n\n\n## Questions\n\n1. [SOLVED] Most of the guides I've seen (like this one) are using physical cores in the formula. What I don't understand is why not use threads (logical cores) instead? Weren't threads created specifically to double the floating point calculations performance? Why are we ignoring them then?\n\n2. [SOLVED] Am I doing it correctly at all? I couldn't find a single reliable source for calculating FLOPS, all the information on the internet is contradicting. For the i7 7700HQ Kaby Lake CPU I found FLOPS values as low as 29 GFLOPS even though the formula above gives us 358 GFLOPS. I don't know what to believe.\n\n3. Is there a cross-platform (Win, Mac, Linux) library in Node.js \/ Python \/ C++ that just returns all the GPU stats like shading cores, clock, available instruction sets (or FP32, FP64 FLOPS values) so I could calculate the max theoretical performance myself? It's quite ridiculous that we cannot get the FLOPS stats from the CPU \/ GPU directly, instead we have to download and parse a wiki page to get the value. Even when using C++, it seems (I don't actually know) we have to download the 2 GB CUDA toolkit just to get access to the basic Nvidia GPU information like the amount of cores - which would make it practically impossible to make the app available for others, since no one would download a 2 GB app.\n\n\u2022 As a partial answer I believe what you are calling \"threads\" is a trick that allows for a core to host what looks like two threads at a time (hyper-threading) while only real having one actual physical core to compute with. I am not certain entirely about the details of how Intel did this but I think it has to do with filling in holes in pipelines and such. This will not in principle happen if you are computing something heavy but for a lot of more common use cases for a desktop OS this does make sense. If you are interested in actual compute throughput though this is usually not counted. \u2013\u00a0Kyle Mandli Nov 17 '20 at 16:15\n\u2022 @KyleMandli thanks for the clarification, I suppose that makes sense \u2013\u00a0AlekseyHoffman Nov 17 '20 at 16:27\n\u2022 One part of the proposed computation is frequency. I assume you are aware that with modern hardware, there is not the frequency. Operating frequency will differ based on temperature and power draw (e.g. most GPUs), or instruction set usage and utilization (e.g. most x86 CPUs), and possibly all of the mentioned factors. \u2013\u00a0njuffa Nov 17 '20 at 20:42\n\u2022 You'll have to replace MHz everywhere by GHz. \u2013\u00a0Wolfgang Bangerth Nov 17 '20 at 21:10\n\u2022 There's no single \"actual\" performance. For instance, when multiplying large matrices on Volta GPUs, my \"actual\" performance is close to theoretical, 90 Tops\/second. Meanwhile training resnet-50, it's more like 20 Tops\/second -- medium.com\/@yaroslavvb\/\u2026 \u2013\u00a0Yaroslav Bulatov Nov 17 '20 at 21:43\n\nYou can calculate GFLOP rates this way, but the numbers are pretty meaningless on today's hardware:\n\n\u2022 Floating point operations require a variable number of clock cycles. An addition is generally cheaper than a multiplication, but each generally takes more than one clock cycle of the 2.8 billion cycles you quite.\n\n\u2022 When you have hyperthreading, you have two threads running on one core, but the core will still have only one floating point addition unit and so the two threads can't execute floating point additions at the same time.\n\n\u2022 Floating point operations are energy hungry, and energy is converted into heat. When you do a lot of FLOPs, processors overheat and step down their clock frequencies.\n\n\u2022 If you use the right instructions, you can do floating point multiply-add (FMA) operations that make a multiplication-and-addition faster than doing these operations separately.\n\n\u2022 Similarly, with SIMD instructions, a core can do the same operation on multiple pieces of data at the same time -- say, add four pairs of floating point numbers together, yielding 4 FLOPs at the same time. But this requires having a problem where an algorithm actually requires this to happen, rather than using the results of the first addition in the second one. As a consequence, SIMD instructions only contribute to the speed with which some algorithms can be executed, but not others.\n\n\u2022 Most importantly, you will generally want to do operations on data from memory, but moving data from main memory onto the processor takes far far longer than actually doing any operations on the data -- like a factor of 100 longer (order of magnitude). So you generally don't see even a small fraction of the theoretical floating point performance of processors in real applications: generally substantially less than 10% of the theoretical peak performance.\n\nIn other words, calculating peak performance has become sort of a meaningless business: It has nothing very much to do with the actual performance of a processor.\n\n\u2022 You might also discuss how SIMD floating-point units can increase the theoretical peak performance. \u2013\u00a0Brian Borchers Nov 17 '20 at 21:59\n\u2022 Thanks for your input, guys, I understand those points and understand how advanced instructions sets affect floating point performance. I guess I'll just stick with the theoretical max for now. I wish there was at least a formula that would approximate the actual FLOPS performance just from the time it takes for CPU to compute a specific function. \u2013\u00a0AlekseyHoffman Nov 17 '20 at 22:10\n\u2022 @AlekseyHoffman There is no formula, just measurements. That's why the TOP 500 list is based on actual measurements of performance, not theoretical top performance. \u2013\u00a0Wolfgang Bangerth Nov 18 '20 at 18:03\n\u2022 @BrianBorchers Yes, good idea. \u2013\u00a0Wolfgang Bangerth Nov 18 '20 at 18:10\n\nYoy can read in Russian - how to calculate FLOPS.\n\nGHz doesn't show FLOPS. One processor with the same GHz can be much faster than the other with the same GHz.\n\nP.S. gpu-s \"rx 590\" and very old \"r7 250x\" have almost the same GHz. But ... this is even not correct to compare their performance)\n\n\u2022 Hi welcome to scicomp! In stackexchange is better to have post self-contained (see here ). Please, for improve the post, try to edit the answer with the core information of the article. \u2013\u00a0Mauro Vanzetto Jan 11 at 9:19","date":"2021-05-16 14:52:41","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.4482695460319519, \"perplexity\": 1203.7812106445017}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-21\/segments\/1620243991224.58\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20210516140441-20210516170441-00591.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Q: Is there such a thing as a Strange Iron Curtain? I love the Iron Curtain reskinned stock minigun (awarded via "Poker Night at the Inventory"), and have put a Professional Killstreak kit on it. I'd really like to strangify it too, though, and there don't seem to be any Iron Curtain Strangifiers on the community market. None of my research has shown up any such thing... but nothing has proven it impossible either.
Do strangifiers exist for all weapons? Or alternatively, is there such a thing as a "generic strangifier", able to be applied to any weapon?
A: From this table, the Iron Curtain does not have a Strange quality. Strangifiers only exist for weapons that are able to have the Strange quality.
| {
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\section{Introduction}
Haemodynamcis in large arteries is commonly described by the incompressible Newtonian Navier-Stokes equations, hence modelling whole blood to have a constant density and viscosity. While this is acceptable for larger arteries at high flow rates, it is more appropriate to adopt a thixotropic non-Newtonian shear-thinning rheological model for viscosity when a larger variation of shear rates are apparent as evident is smaller vessels or slower flows. This would then take into account the presence of the erythrocytes and other constituents of whole blood \cite{robertson2008, robertson2009} in a continuum model. However, when smaller vessels of the cardiovascular system are considered the dimension of the conduits and the circulating cells are of similar scales, and it is therefore necessary to discretise and model whole blood as a multi-component medium. At these smaller scales, the properties of the cells (such as material constitutive laws for the membrane), the inter-cellular flow interactions (such as flow wakes) and other biochemical and biological phenomena (such as tethering or remodelling), must be considered and together describe a complex physical interplay.
Experimental works have been at the forefront and driving much of the research and our understanding of haemodynamic micro-circulation for many years \cite{goldsmith1971}, and it is only with the advance of commodity computational resources that new numerical methods have been developed and with them computational simulations of micro-circulation have been possible. Numerical simulations provide a fine spatial and temporal resolution of physical variables, which enable for a quantitative analysis and allow for different mathematical models and hypotheses to be tested. Some fundamental studies of cells or capsules have been undertaken using computational simulations, investigating the importance of cell shape and deformability, concentration and apparent viscosity, transport and migration, providing important insight into micro-circulation dynamics \cite{pozrikidis1995, matsunaga2016, tsubota2010, nix2014, omori2012b, matsunaga2015, fedosov20111, fedosov2014}.
Research in the field of blood micro-circulation has seen a range of applications and interests. For example, specially designed micro-channel geometries have been used to separate or sort suspended cells. Such designs include simple, sudden expansions which promote cell focusing \cite{faivre2006, yaginuma2013, faustino2016}, or alternatively repeated sections of hyperbolic micro-channels \cite{rodrigues2016}, wavy channels \cite{di2007}, guiding grooves \cite{hsu2008}, multi-stage micro-fluidic devices involving bends and siphoning \cite{tanaka2012, omori2015}, though a range of different micro-fluidic device configurations exist \cite{pinho2013, bento2018}. These largely make use of inertial forces of the cells \cite{yoon2009, martel2012}, as well as cell deformability \cite{losserand2019, nix2014, yaginuma2013, omori2012}. Interestingly however, micro-channels may also be designed in a very similar fashion to enhance mixing of the flow \cite{sudarsan2006}, and a review of low cost fabrication devices is presented in \cite{faustino2016}.
While inertial effects have been predominantly used to sort cells in micro-fluidic devices, it is known that cell deformability and shape play important roles in their transport dynamics \cite{nix2014, coclite20183, coclite20172, coclite20181, decuzzi2010, omori2012b, omori2015}. The volumetric concentration of suspended particles in flow is also known to affect the apparent viscosity \cite{matsunaga2015, matsunaga2016, fedosov2014} of the medium, and the resulting inter-cellular flow interactions have been observed to affect transport of the cells through different micro-channel configurations \cite{gambaruto2016, gong2009, bessonov2014, vahidkhah2016, sun2006}. The motion of suspended particles in micro-channels are also known to induce a pattern of wall shear stress variation along the wall \cite{xiong2010, freund2014, gambaruto2016}, which is not only important in mechanotransduction and signalling pathways, but also in cell adhesion mechanics \cite{takeishi2016}. The effect of particle suspensions of different sizes has also been investigated, with relevance to leukocyte radial margination \cite{takeishi2014} and micro- and nano-particles on drug delivery \cite{muller2014, takeishi2017}.
In the present work we investigate ejection of capsules from a narrow channel to a reservoir, comparing different size ratios of channel and capsule diameters. Specifically, the aim of the present work is to detail the dynamics of circular capsules when navigating across a geometric discontinuity. The presence of capsules dragged by the flow locally increases the apparent viscosity of the fluid in the region immediately near and inside the membrane itself. This causes the homogenisation of the velocity field disturbed by the presence of the particles, and observe that a train of three particles will tend to act as a single larger body (because of the inter-particle interaction). Finally, the effect of the local increased viscosity also causes the leading capsule to move faster than the other two trailing capsules. We perform numerical simulations of micro-fluidic particulate flow of deformable capsules in discontinuous geometries, with relevance to capsule injection in applications such as drug delivery. This flow set-up has not been covered in the literature, and consequently we focus on describing capsule motion, membrane deformation and fluid dynamics, as a preliminary investigation in this field.
\section{Computational Method}
Computational methods to model and solve for multi-component micro-circulation has developed immensely in the last decades. Numerical methods which discretise the domain as lumped volumes (or masses) of fluid, typically denoted as \textit{particle methods} have been popular, including dissipative particle dynamics (DPD), smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), moving particle semi-implicit method (MPS), multiparticle collision dynamics (MCP) \cite{gambaruto2015, alizadehrad2012, tanaka2005, noguchi2007, bakhshian2016, bakhshian2019}. These methods are based on expressing the governing equations in a moving reference frame, which is well suited to flows with deformable bodies and moving boundaries. Here we adopt a mixed approach, in which the fluid is solved on a fixed grid, while the capsule membranes are described in a moving reference frame. The solution to the membrane forces is then interpolated to the fixed grid. In doing so we adopt a immersed boundary method, and employ the lattice Boltzmann method as the fluid solver.
\subsection{Lattice Boltzmann Method}
The evolution of the fluid is defined in terms of a set of $N$ discrete distribution functions,$[f_{i}], (i=0,\dots,N-1)$, which obey the dimensionless Boltzmann equation
\begin{equation}
{f_i(\vec{x}+\vec{e}_i\Delta t, t+\Delta t)-f_i(\vec{x}, t)=-\frac{\Delta t}{\tau}[f_i(\vec{x}, t)-f^{eq}_i(\vec{x}, t)]}\, ,
\label{BGK}
\end{equation}
in which $\vec{x}$ and $t$ are the spatial and time coordinates, respectively; $[\vec{e}_{i}],(i=0,...,N-1)$ is the set of $N$ discrete velocities; $\Delta t$ is the time step; and $\tau$ is the relaxation time given by the unique non-null eigenvalue of the collision term in the BGK-approximation \cite{bgk}. The kinematic viscosity of the flow is strictly related to $\tau$ as $\nu=c_s^2\, (\tau-\frac{1}{2}) \Delta t$ being $c_s=\frac{1}{\sqrt{3}}\frac{\Delta x}{\Delta t}$ the reticular speed of sound. The moments of the distribution functions define the fluid density $\rho=\sum _{i}f_{i}$, velocity $\vec{u}= \sum _{i}f_{i} \vec{e}_{i}/ \rho$, and pressure $p=c_{s}^{2} \rho =c_{s}^{2} \sum _{i} f_{i}$. The local equilibrium density functions $[f_{i}^{eq}] (i=0,...,N-1)$ are expressed by the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution:
\begin{equation}
{f^{eq}_i(\vec{x},t)=\omega_i\rho \Bigl[ 1+\frac{1}{c_s^2}(\vec{e}_i\cdot \vec{u})+\frac{1}{2c_s^4}(\vec{e}_i\cdot \vec{u})^2-\frac{1}{2c_s^2}(\vec{u} \cdot \vec{u}) \Bigr] }\, .
\label{feq}
\end{equation}
On the two-dimensional square lattice with $N=9$ speeds $(D2Q9)$ \cite{d2q9}, the set of discrete velocities is given by
\begin{equation}
{\vec{e}_i= \begin{cases}
(0,0)\, , & \quad if \quad i = 0 \\
\Biggl(\cos\Biggl(\frac{(i-1)\pi}{2}\Biggr),\sin\Biggl(\frac{(i-1)\pi}{2}\Biggr)\Biggr)\, , & \quad if \quad i = 1-4 \\
\sqrt{2}\Biggl(\cos\Biggl(\frac{(2i-9)\pi}{4}\Biggr),\sin\Biggl(\frac{(2i-9)\pi}{4}\Biggr)\Biggr)\, , & \quad if \quad i = 5-8 \\
\end{cases}}
\label{GaussHermite}
\end{equation}
with the weight,$\omega_i=1/9$ for $i=1-4$, $\omega_i= 1/36$ for $i=5-8$, and $\omega_0=4/9$. Here, we adopt a discretisation in the velocity space of the equilibrium distribution based on the Hermite polynomial expansion of this distribution \cite{shan06bis}.
\subsection{Immersed Boundary Treatment}
Deforming body models are commonly based on continuum approaches using strain energy functions to compute the membrane response \cite{pozrikidis2001,skalak1973,kruger2012}. However, a particle-based model governed by molecular dynamics has emerged due to its mathematical simplicity while providing consistent predictions \cite{dao2006,fedosov20111,nakamura2013,ye2014}. In this work, a particle-based model is employed by coupling the Immersed-Boundary (IB) technique with BGK-lattice Boltzmann solver. The immersed body is a worm-like chain of $nv$ vertices linked with $nl$ linear elements, whose centroids are usually called \textit{Lagrangian markers}. A forcing term $[\vec{\mathcal{F}}_{i}] (i=0,...,8)$, accounting for the immersed boundary, is included as an additional contribution on the right-hand side of Eq.\eqref{BGK}:
\begin{equation}
{f_i(\vec{x}+\vec{e}_i\Delta t, t+\Delta t)-f_i(\vec{x}, t)=-\frac{\Delta t}{\tau}[f_i(\vec{x}, t)-f^{eq}_i(\vec{x}, t)]+\Delta t \vec{\mathcal{F}}_{i}}\, .
\label{forcedBGK}
\end{equation}
$\vec{\mathcal{F}}_{i}$ is expanded in term of the reticular Mach number, $\frac{\vec{e}_{i}}{c_{s}}$, resulting in:
\begin{equation}
{\vec{\mathcal{F}}_{i}=\Biggl(1-\frac{1}{2\tau}\omega_i \Bigl[\frac{\vec{e}_i-\vec{u}}{c_s^2}+\frac{\vec{e}_i\cdot \vec{u}}{c_s^4}\vec{e}_i \Bigr] \Biggr) \cdot \vec{f}_{ib}}\, ,
\label{ForcingTerm}
\end{equation}
where $\vec{f}_{ib}$ is a body force term. Due to the presence of the forcing term, the mass density and the momentum density are derived as $\rho=\sum _{i}f_{i}$ and $\rho\vec{u}= \sum _{i}f_{i} \vec{e}_{i}+\frac{\Delta t}{2}\vec{\mathcal{F}}_{i}$.
Within this parametrisation, the forced Navier--Stokes equations is recovered with a second order accuracy \cite{guo2011,derosis2014,derosis20141,suzuki2015,wang2015}. The external boundaries of the computational domain are treated with the known velocity bounce back conditions by Zou and He \cite{zouhe1997}. The IBM procedure, extensively proposed and validated by Coclite and colleagues \cite{coclite20163,coclite20172,coclite20181,coclite20183,coclite20191}, is here adopted and the moving-least squares reconstruction by Vanella et al.~\cite{vanella2009} is employed to exchange all LBM distribution functions between the Eulerian lattice and the Lagrangian chain. Finally, the body force term in Eq.\eqref{ForcingTerm}, $\vec{f}_{ib}$, is evaluated through the formulation by Favier et al~\cite{pinelli2014}.
\textbf{\textit{Elastic Membrane deformation.}} Elastic membranes are modelled by means of an elastic strain, bending resistance, and total enclosed area conservation potentials. Specifically, the nodal forces corresponding to the elastic energy for nodes 1 and 2 connected by edge \textit{l} reads as
\begin{equation}
{\begin{cases}
\vec{F}_{1}^{s}&=-k_{s}(l-l_{0})\frac{\vec{r}_{1,2}}{l} \\
\vec{F}_{2}^{s}&=-k_{s}(l-l_{0})\frac{\vec{r}_{2,1}}{l} \\
\end{cases}}\, ,
\label{strainFor}
\end{equation}
where $\vec{r}_{i,j}=\vec{r}_{i}-\vec{r}_{j}$ with $r_{i}$ position vector of the node \textit{i}.
The bending resistance related to the $v$-th vertex connecting two adjacent element is
\begin{equation}
{V_{v}^{b}=\frac{1}{2}k_{b}(k_{v}-k_{v,0})^{2}}\, ,
\label{bendPot}
\end{equation}
being $k_{b}$ the bending constant, $k_{v}$ the current local curvature in the $v$-th vertex, $k_{v,0}$ the local curvature in the $v$-th vertex for the stress-free configuration. The curvature is evaluated by measuring the variation of the angle between two adjacent elements ($\theta -\theta _{0}$), with $\theta _{0}$ the angle in the stress free configuration. Given this, the forces on the nodes $v_{left}$, $v$, and $v_{right}$ are obtained as
\begin{equation}
{\begin{cases}
\vec{F}_{v_{left}}^{b}&=k_{b}(\theta -\theta_{0})\frac{l_{left}}{l_{left}+l_{right}}\vec{n}_{v} \\
\vec{F}_{v}^{b}&=-k_{b}(\theta -\theta _{0})\vec{n}_{v} \\
\vec{F}_{v_{right}}^{b}&=k_{b}(\theta -\theta_{0})\frac{l_{right}}{l_{left}+l_{right}}\vec{n}_{v} \\
\end{cases}}\, ,
\label{bendFor}
\end{equation}
where $l_{right}$ and $l_{left}$ are the length of the two adjacent left and right edges, respectively, and $\vec{n}_{v}$ is the outward unity vector centred in \textit{v}. Note that, in this context the relation between the strain response constant $k_{s}$ and $k_{b}$ is $E_{b}=\frac{k_{b}}{k_{s}r^{2}}$, where r is the particle radius.
In order to limit the membrane stretching, an effective pressure force term is considered. Thus, the penalty force is expressed in term of the
reference pressure $p_{ref}$ and directed along the normal inward unity vector of the $l$-th element $n_{l}^{-}$, as
\begin{equation}
{\vec{F}_{l}^{a}=-k_{a}(1-\frac{A}{A_{0}})p_{ref} \vec{n}_{l}^{-} l_{l}}\, ,
\label{areaFor}
\end{equation}
with $l_{l}$ the length of the selected element, $k_{a}$ the incompressibility coefficient, $A$ the current enclosed area, $A_{0}
$ the enclosed area in the stress-free configuration. The enclosed area is computed using the Green's theorem along the curve, $A=\int{x_{l}dy_{l}-y_{l}dx_{l}}$. Within this formulation $k_{a}=1$ returns a perfectly incompressible membrane. Note that, $\vec{F}_{l}^{a}$ is evenly distributed to the two vertices connecting the \textit{l}-th element ($v_{left}$ and $v_{right}$) as $\vec{F}_{l}^{a}=0.5\vec{F}_{v_{left}}^{a}+0.5\vec{F}_{v_{right}}^{a}$.
\textbf{\textit{Particle-Particle Interaction}} Two-body interactions are modelled with a repulsive potential centred in each vertex. The purely repulsive force is such that the minimum allowed distance between two vertices coming from two different particles is $\Delta x$. The impulse acting on vertex $1$, at a distance $d_{1,2}$ from the vertex $2$ of an adjacent particle, is directed in the inward normal direction identified by $\vec{n}_{1}^{-}$ and is given by:
\begin{equation}
{\vec{F}_{1}^{pp}=\frac{10^{-4}}{8\sqrt{2}}\sqrt{\frac{\Delta x}{d_{1,2}^{5}}}\vec{n}_{1}^{-}}\, .
\label{repFor}
\end{equation}
\textbf{\textit{Hydrodynamics Stresses}} Pressure and viscous stresses exerted by the $l$-th linear element are:
\begin{equation}
{\vec{F}_{l}^{p}(t)=(-p_{l} \vec{n}_{l})l_{l}}\, , \\
\label{hydroForP}
\end{equation}
\begin{equation}
{\vec{F}_{l}^{\tau }(t)=(\bar{\tau }_{l}\cdot \vec{n}_{l})l_{l}}\, ,
\label{hydroForNu}
\end{equation}
where $\bar{\tau }_{l}$ and $p_{l}$ are the viscous stress tensor and the pressure evaluated in the centroid of the element, respectively;
$\vec{n}_{l}$is the outward normal unit vector while $l_{l}$ is its length. The pressure and velocity derivatives in Eq.s \eqref{hydroForP} and \eqref{hydroForNu} are computed using a probe in the normal positive direction of each element, being the probe length $1.2\Delta x$~\cite{vanella2009,MDdTJCP2016}
\subsection{\textsc{Fluid-Structure interaction}}
Particles dynamics is determined by \textit{dynamics IB} technique described in \cite{coclite20191}, using the solution of the Newton equation for each Lagrangian vertex, accounting for both internal, Eq.s \eqref{strainFor}, \eqref{bendFor}, \eqref{areaFor}, and \eqref{repFor}, and external stresses, Eq.s \eqref{hydroForP} and \eqref{hydroForNu}. Then, no-slip boundary conditions are imposed using a weak coupling approach \cite{coclite20163}. The total force $\vec{F}_{v}^{tot}(t)$ acting on the $v$-th element of the immersed body is evaluated in time and the position of the vertices is updated at each Newtonian dynamics time step considering the membrane mass uniformly
distributed over the $nv$ vertices,
\begin{equation}
{m_{v}\dot{\vec{u}}_{v}=\vec{F}_{v}^{tot}(t)=\vec{F}_{v}^{s}(t)+\vec{F}_{v}^{b}(t)+\vec{F}_{v}^{a}(t)+\vec{F}_{v}^{pp}(t)+\vec{F}_{v}^{p}(t)+\vec{F}_{v}^{\tau}(t)}\, .
\label{newtonSoft}
\end{equation}
The Newton equation of motion is integrated by using the Verlet algorithm. Specifically, a first tentative velocity is considered into the integration process, $\dot{\vec{x}}_{v,0}(t)$, obtained interpolating the fluid velocity from the surrounding lattice nodes
\begin{equation}
{\vec{x}_{v}(t+\Delta t)=\vec{x}_{v}(t)+\dot{\vec{x}}_{v,0}(t)\Delta t+\frac{1}{2}\frac{\vec{F}_{v}^{tot}(t)}{m_{v}}\Delta t^{2}+O(\Delta t^{3})}\, ,
\label{verletPos}
\end{equation}
then, the velocity at the time level $t+\Delta t$ is computed as
\begin{equation}
{\vec{u}_{v}(t+\Delta t)=\frac{\frac{3}{2}\vec{x}_{v}(t+\Delta t)-2\vec{x}_{v}(t)+\frac{1}{2}\vec{x}_{v}(t-\Delta t)}{\Delta t}+O(\Delta t^{2})}\, ,
\label{verletVel}
\end{equation}
It should be noted that the present formulation is unconditionally stable for small deformation of the capsule membrane and for small velocity variations applied, as previously demonstrated by the authors~\cite{coclite20163,coclite20183,coclite20191}.
\subsection{\textsc{Set-up and Boundary Conditions}}
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.3]{Schematic_v2.pdf}\\
\vspace{3mm}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
\textbf{Ca} & \textbf{Re} & \multirow{2}*{\textbf{l/d}} & \multirow{2}*{\textbf{r/d}} \\
($=\nu \, \rho \, u_{max} / k_s$) & ($= u_{max} \, d / \nu$) & & \\
\hline
\multirow{3}*{$10^{-3}$} & \multirow{3}*{$10^{-1}$} & 1.0 & 0.25 \\
& & 2.5 & 0.50 \\
& & 5.0 & 0.75 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{{\bf Schematic of the physical problem.} {\bf Top} Sketch of the computational domain with characteristics dimensions and lengths, as well as boundary conditions. {\bf Bottom} Non-dimensional groups used in the computations: the capillary number regulating the mechanical stiffness of the membranes, $Ca$; the Reynolds number regulating the flow velocity, $Re$; the ratio between channel diameter and reservoir height, $l/d$, and the ratio between particle diameter and reservoir height, $r/l$.}
\label{Schematic}
\end{figure}
The simulations are performed for a two-dimensional domain as shown in Figure~\ref{Schematic} and the fluid is considered to be water. The flow direction is left-to-right, the horizontal axis is denoted by $x-$axis or co-axial direction, and the vertical axis is denoted by $y-$axis or radial direction. The analysis is based on simulations either a single or three in-line spherical capsules, flowing from a channel of small diameter into that of a larger diameter, as shown in Figure~\ref{Schematic}. In subsequent discussion and presentation of results, we refer to the upstream direction as that closer to the inflow, and the downstream direction that closer to the outflow. One should however recognise that the capsule will be travelling faster than the bulk flow in the channel sections, since it is located furthest from the stationary walls. Consequently, in a moving reference frame following a capsule, its wake and disturbance it induces on the flow will in effect be in the upstream direction.
The computational domain is a rectangular channel by the height $l$ and length $3l$ with no-slip boundary conditions along $y$. The grid resolution is such that $l$ is discretised with $500 \Delta x$. The section $x=0$ is parametrised as a velocity inlet section with a parabolic inlet profile, while the outlet section is located at $x=3l$ (see Figure~\ref{Schematic}) and is set as a convective condition \cite{yang2013}. The Reynolds number is fixed equal to 0.1 and is given by $Re = \frac{u_{max}\, d}{\nu}$; where $u_{max}$ is the maximum velocity for the plane Hagen-Poiseuille profile (parabolic profile) established in $x=0$, $d$ is the narrow channel diameter, and $\nu$ the kinematic viscosity of the fluid ($\nu=1.2\times10^{-6}$~m$^2$/s). Note that, $Re$ represents the ratio of inertial to viscous forces, and can also be interpreted as the ratio of viscous to convective time scales which act on the fluid. Here, the Reynolds number equals 0.1, consequently viscous effects dominate, with viscous forces greater than inertial forces and the viscous time scale is smaller (hence acts faster, stabilising the flow) than the convective time scale. The capsules are initially at the rest, with no pre-stress applied, and of circular section with diameter $r$ and stiffness modulated by the capillary number $Ca = 10^{-3} =\frac{\rho \nu u_{max}}{k_s}$, where $\rho$ is the density of the fluid in which capsules are immersed ($\rho = 1000$~kg/m$^3$) in and $k_s$ is the elastic constant used for the worm-like chain composing the membranes (see Eq~\eqref{strainFor}). $Ca$ represents the ratio of the viscous force to the elastic force consequently representing, within this definition, capsules slightly more rigid than in other studies~\cite{omori2012,nix2014}. Note that, the typical stiffness for a red blood cell is $k_s=1.5\times10^{-4}Nm$ that would lead to Ca$_{rbc}=10^{-2}$ within this definition. To ensure the scheme stability, all the computations are performed with $\tau=1.0$ in the Lattice Boltzmann Method.
The present parametrisation deals with the deformation of a circular membrane in a rectangular two-dimensional channel injected into a reservoir. Given the narrow dimensions and axial symmetry of the problem and set-up, the results obtained are directly transferable to the analogous three-dimensional set-up. For a general case, the deformation and dynamics of initially spherical capsules in a three-dimensional circular capillary flowing into a reservoir will yield different quantitative results. However, the governing physics is unaltered, and while the mechanics in two or three dimensions is different, results from a two-dimensional investigation are transferable to a three-dimensional set-up and one can expect similar qualitative results and trends.
\section{Results and Discussion}
Numerical simulations for flow set-up outlined in Figure~\ref{Schematic} were run for the following three cases: without capsules; with one capsule; with three capsules (numbered left-to-right). The available set-up combinations have resulted in a set of simulations, aimed at sampling the solution space in order to capture the physics of flow of capsules as they are injected into a reservoir.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.3]{OnlyFluidChip.jpg}
\caption{{\bf Flow patterns for different width of the reservoir.} {\bf a} Contour of the longitudinal component of the velocity field for $l/d=$ 2.5 (left) and 5.0 (right). {\bf b} Contour of the vertical component of the velocity field for $l/d=$ 2.5 (left) and 5.0 (right). {\bf c} Relative pressure distribution in the computational flow field ($p_0$ is the outlet section pressure). Data for $l/d=$ 1.0 are shown in the Appendix.}
\label{OnlyFluid}
\end{figure}
The solution for flow without any capsules are shown in Figure~\ref{OnlyFluid} and Figure~\ref{SuppOnlyFluid} (in the Appendix), for purpose of comparison. As expected we see the flow profile develop from the parabolic inflow profile to a flattened paraboloid profile on approaching the reservoir. The flow accelerates in the radial (vertical) direction and decelerates in the co-axial (horizontal) direction as it approaches the end of the smaller channel before discharging into the reservoir. The radial acceleration is effected by a pressure gradient which drives the flow to turn at the geometric discontinuity. The flow separates at the geometric discontinuity, reattaching on the horizontal walls of the larger channel.
\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.25]{PartChipDiff_confronto.jpg}
\caption{{\bf Flow patterns during the transport of a single capsule in the micro-channel.} {\bf a} Contour of the longitudinal velocity field for $l/d=$ 5.0 and $r/d=$ 0.50 taken at four different time steps, namely $t\, u_{max}/d=$ 0, 5, 10, and 20. {\bf b} Contour plot of difference between the longitudinal velocity with ($u_x$) and without ($u_{x,NoC}$) the capsule immersed in at four different time steps, namely $t\, u_{max}/d=$ 0, 5, 10, and 20.}
\label{PartChipDiff}
\bigskip
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.22]{Circles_1.jpg}
\caption{{\bf Injection of a capsule in a reservoir.} {\bf a} Distribution of the $x-$coordinate of the capsule centre of mass $x_{cm}$ over time. {\bf b} Distribution of the $x-$velocity of the capsule centre of mass $u_{cm,x}$ over time. {\bf c} Distribution of the capsule stretching computed as the relative difference between the current, $p$, and the initial, $p_0$, perimeter of the capsule ($\delta p=\frac{p-p_0}{p_0}$).}
\label{SingleCaps}
\end{figure}
We now turn our attention to the ejection of a single capsule. While the results and discussion are transferable to the other set-up combinations, we present results for the geometry set-up $r/d = 0.50$ and $l/d = 5.0$ in Figure~\ref{PartChipDiff} as these favour presentation and discussion. In Figure~\ref{PartChipDiff} we present the (normalised) co-axial flow component, as well as the difference in flow velocity without capsules and with one capsule (coloured by co-axial velocity component). In the following presentation of results this velocity difference is termed the \textit{relative velocity} or \textit{relative flow field}.
Let us first focus on results for time snapshot $t\, u_{max}/d=5$ in Figure~\ref{PartChipDiff}, when the capsule is located in the narrower channel. We observe that the presence of the capsule tends to create a more uniform velocity profile, by increasing the co-axial velocity near to the walls while decreasing it at the centre of the channel. The vector plot showing the relative velocity also shows that the presence of the flowing capsule results in flow around the capsule, from upstream to downstream. This is because the capsule in effect creates a resistance to the flow, causing it to flow more around it in comparison to the parabolic velocity profile. The relative flow field consequently appears as a vortex pair (or ring in three-dimensions) close to the wall, travelling with the capsule and aligned approximately at its maximum diameter. This vortex ring, identified in the relative flow field, induces a co-axial velocity which drives the capsule through the channel, and this can be seen by the higher velocity at the maximum diameter of the capsule. The wall shear stress is the tangential traction force the flow exerts on the wall due to viscous effects, and we observe that at the capsule's maximum diameter the co-axial velocity near the channel wall is the same as the parabolic flow, and hence the wall shear stress is effectively unaltered. However, slightly upstream and downstream of the capsule's maximum diameter we observe that the co-axial velocity near the wall is greater than for the parabolic profile, indicating a higher wall shear stress. This results in two locations (or rings in three-dimensions) of higher wall shear stress compared to the parabolic flow solution, travelling with the capsule and approximately aligned with the capsule's leading and trailing edges. This is in contract to the results of the wall shear stress `footprint' observed as red blood cells, which show a single higher band of wall shear stress as the deformable cells are in proximity to the walls \cite{xiong2010, freund2014, gambaruto2016}.
We now turn our attention to results for time snapshot $t\, u_{max}/d=10$ in Figure~\ref{PartChipDiff}, when the capsule has been ejected into the reservoir. We observe that for this instance, the mean velocity of the capsule is the same as solution when no capsule is present, while in comparison the flow is moving faster in front of the capsule and slower behind. We also observe that the relative flow field presents a vortex ring at the trailing side of the capsule, travelling with the capsule. This vortex ring is counter-rotating to the vortex ring observed in the narrower channel section, and is set up by the geometric discontinuity. The direction of rotation of this vortex ring induces a velocity which promotes the flow to turn around the geometric discontinuity and results in a smaller flow separation. The induced velocity of this vortex ring also acts to decelerate the capsule co-axial motion as it ejects into the reservoir.
Finally we note that for time snapshot $t\, u_{max}/d= 20$ the flow of a single capsule in a large channel or reservoir has no marked influence on the flow field as compared to the above discussed time snapshots {$t\, u_{max}/d=$ 5 and 10}.
Similar flow fields and relative flow fields were observed in the other set-up combinations. We turn our attention therefore to the motion of the capsule and its change in perimeter length, presented in Figure~\ref{SingleCaps}, and investigate the effects of the geometric variations based on the ratio $l/d$ and $r/d$. Overall the trends appear linear as one varies the geometric ratios $l/d$ and $r/d$, however there are some small deviations which are worth highlighting and discussing.
For comparison purposes in this figure, the case for $l/d=1.0$ (straight channel without discontinuity) is also plotted. We observe that the capsule velocity and perimeter length change are constant (after rapid adjustment from the zero velocity initial conditions of the simulations), however there are variations based on the $r/d$ ratio. At larger values of $r/d$ the capsule forms a larger blockage in the channel, and we observe a more blunt velocity profile is caused by the $r/d=0.75$ capsule compared to the $r/d=0.25$ capsule. The greater perimeter length change is also observed for the $r/d=0.75$ capsule, since there are larger shear rates in proximity with the channel wall aligned to the capsule's largest diameter as it flows. This was observed in Figure~\ref{PartChipDiff} from the relative flow field.
We now focus on the channel geometry set-up with {$l/d=$ 2.5 and 5.0} within Figure~\ref{SingleCaps}. We observe that the traces of normalised co-axial position $x_{cm}/d$ for capsules with {$r/d=$ 0.25 and 0.50} lie closer than for capsule {$r/d = 0.75$}. The lag is seen to appear at the moment when the capsule is injected into the reservoir, with {$t\, u_{max} / d \approx 7.5$}. We observe that the traces of normalised co-axial velocity $u_{cm,x}/u_{max}$ are indistinguishable while the capsule lies within the narrower channel, and parallel based on their $r/d$ value. The capsule velocity then transits to the similar values once the capsule enters the reservoir occurs rapidly, now based on the value of $l/d$, while the ratio $r/d$ has little effect. For $l/d=5.0$ and $r/d=0.75$, we observe that there is a secondary peak in the velocity at {$t\, u_{max} / d \approx 8$}. We observe that the perimeter length change $\delta p$ is relatively constant as the capsule travels along the narrower channel, but decreases and then increases sharply as the capsule is ejected into the reservoir. The decrease in perimeter length is due to the capsule leading edge slowing down as it reaches the reservoir, resulting in a decrease in membrane stress. The subsequent increase in perimeter length occurs as the capsule completes its transition into the reservoir, during which the anterior portion of the capsule is already in the reservoir and has a low velocity, however the posterior portion of the capsule still has a larger velocity, causing the capsule to flatten (stretching radially). Once in the reservoir the capsule membrane relaxes and tends to assume an undeformed shape. The change in perimeter length are larger in the narrower channel due to higher shear rates, more so with increasing $r/d$ ratio, which was also observed from the relative flow field shown in Figure~\ref{PartChipDiff}. For $l/d=5.0$ and $r/d=0.75$, we observe that the sudden decrease and subsequent increase in perimeter lengths were in proportion higher than other cases.
Focusing on the case with $l/d=5.0$ and $r/d=0.75$, we summarise that we observed a different behaviour as the capsule was ejected into the reservoir, compared to the other simulations. This led to a lag in its co-axial position, a second peak in the co-axial velocity and more pronounced change in the perimeter length. The reasons for these phenomena are principally due to the size of the capsule, which owing to the membrane have the effect of locally constraining the flow to be more uniform (hence a homogeneous velocity field). Capsule deformability and the elastic forces are also important, without which we would not obtain the second velocity peak, for example.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.25]{MultiPartChipDiff_confronto.jpg}
\caption{{\bf Flow patterns during the transport of three aligned capsules in the micro-channel.} {\bf a} Contour of the longitudinal velocity field for $l/d=$ 5.0 and $r/d=$ 0.50 taken at four different time steps, namely $t u_{max}/d=$ 0, 5, 10, and 20. {\bf b} Contour plot of difference between the longitudinal velocity with ($u_x$) and without ($u_{x,NoC}$) the capsules immersed in at four different time steps, namely $t u_{max}/d=$ 0, 5, 10, and 20.}
\label{MultiPartChipDiff}
\end{figure}
We now turn our attention to the results for three capsules flowing in the channel and ejecting into the reservoirs. The flow field and relative velocity for the geometry set-up $r/d = 0.50$ and $l/d = 5.0$ with three capsules is presented in Figure~\ref{MultiPartChipDiff}. In comparison to the flow of the single capsule (see Figure~\ref{PartChipDiff}), we see that within the narrow channel the disturbance in the flow field extends to influence both upstream and downstream capsules, due to their relative proximity. Specifically, the capsules effect a blunter velocity profile with respect to the parabolic profile (obtained without capsules). This phenomenon is often described by a shear-thinning non-Newtonian model for the viscosity. At time $t\, u_{max} / d =10$, when the capsules are entirely in the reservoir, the leading capsules {(capsules 2 and 3)} are travelling faster than is the case without capsules, while the left-most capsule {(capsule 1)} is travelling slower. This is again due to the capsule acting to locally constrain the flow to be more uniform, and in this case extending the apparent jet formed by the flow ejecting from the narrower channel into the reservoir. At this time instance we also note that a vortex ring is formed at the trailing section of capsule~1 only, further highlighting that the flow disturbances between the three capsules result in a local homogenisation of the velocity field, and the capsules therefore tend to act as a single larger object.
In Figure~\ref{MultiCaps_plots} the properties of the single capsule (also shown in Figure~\ref{SingleCaps}) and of the multiple particles are plotted as function of normalised time. We notice that the effect of the relative reservoir diameter, $l/d$, does not play a noticeable influence beyond a given size. Additionally, we observe a greater effect of the multiple capsules when they are larger, and therefore focus our presentation of results for the set-up $l/d = 5.0$ and $r/d=0.75$. The discussion is amenable to the other set-up cases, and differences are presented. In general, for the smaller capsules with {$r/d=$ 0.50 and 0.25} the same phenomena are present as for the larger capsules, but to a lesser extent. Indeed for the smallest capsules $r/d=0.25$, the effect of the multiple cells is almost imperceivable. The reason for this is a reduced inter-capsule interaction, due to the relatively large capsule separation distance and the small capsule size which will not significantly affect the flow field.
In Figure~\ref{MultiCaps_plots}, observing the traces for set-up $l/d = 5.0$ and $r/d=0.75$, we first note that the capsules exhibit oscillating velocities and change in perimeter, more marked for capsule~3 and least for capsule~1. These oscillations are related to the ejection of capsules into the reservoir and we see, for example, that as capsule~1 enters the reservoir it induces an oscillation in both {capsule 2 and 3}. This chain effect is due to the capsules effectively constraining the fluid, and locally homogenising the velocity field. The apparent viscosity is locally higher, and the capsules, due to their close proximity, effectively act as a single larger body. Another phenomenon of particular interest is that capsule~3 tends to move overall faster, and from the $x/d$ trace we see that it is farther from capsules 1 and 2 towards later times. In order to explain this, we turn to Figure~\ref{MultiPartChipDiff}. We observe that the relative velocity is greatest ahead of capsule~3 when the capsules are in the reservoir (at time $t\, u_{max} /d=10$) and the flow is in the narrower channel a short distance ahead of capsule~3 is undisturbed and parabolic. Since capsule~3 is at the leading edge of the capsules, it is not affected by the wake, and will be able to travel faster. This phenomenon of capsule spacing rearrangement was also observed in \cite{di2007}, though in very different geometries. Finally, we note that the perimeter stretching is greatest overall for capsule~1, due to its location in the end of the capsule train, inducing a more marked wake and consequently higher shear rate (velocity gradients) in the fluid and higher stresses in its membrane. In fact we observe that the change in perimeter length is comparable to the set-up of the single capsule, since it has a similar wake flow field.
\clearpage
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\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\raisebox{0ex}{\begin{turn}{90} \end{turn}}
\includegraphics[scale=0.185]{Multi_Circles.jpg}
\caption{{\bf Transport of three aligned capsules in the micro-channel, for capsule diameter to channel ratio: left column ($r/d=0.25$); middle column ($r/d=0.50$); right column ($r/d=0.75$).} {\bf a} Distribution of the $x-$coordinate of the capsule centre of mass $x_{cm}$ over time for $l/d=2.5$ (top) and $l/d=5.0$ (bottom). {\bf b} Distribution of the $x-$velocity of the capsule centre of mass $u_{cm,x}$ over time for $l/d=2.5$ (top) and $l/d=5.0$ (bottom). {\bf c} Distribution of the capsule stretching computed as the relative difference between the current, $p$, and the initial, $p_0$, perimeter of the capsule ($\delta p=\frac{p-p_0}{p_0}$) for $l/d=2.5$ (top) and $l/d=5.0$ (bottom).}
\label{MultiCaps_plots}
\end{figure}
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\section{Conclusions}
In this work we investigate the dynamics of capsule ejection from a narrow channel into a reservoir, across a geometric discontinuity. We observe that inter-capsule interaction (due to the wakes of their motion) and the constraining of the fluid within the membranes are important mechanism which affects the local apparent viscosity since the stress field must be continuous in the domain.
In order to span a meaningful parameter space, a combination of different configurations were investigated. The capsules were varied to have different sizes, namely {$r/d=$ 0.25, 0.50 and 0.75}, where $r$ is the capsule diameter and $d$ is the narrow channel diameter. Three configurations of channel geometries were investigated, namely {$l/d =$ 1.0, 2.5 and 5.0}, where $l$ is the diameter of the reservoir. Additionally, three different configurations: no capsule, a single capsule, and three in-line capsules, were simulated and investigated. The Capillary number and Reynolds numbers were chosen to be $Ca = 10^{-3}$ and $Re=10^{-1}$.
The simulations were investigated by observing the relative flow field, that is the flow field resulting from capsule flow as compared to the no capsule solutions. This has proved to be an effective means of identifying where the flow field has altered, and consequently to identify the fluid mechanics phenomena causing the changes observed. Additionally, the trajectories, velocities and perimeters of the capsules were tracked during the simulations.
Overall we have seen that the reservoir diameter has negligible effect beyond a threshold, and in the resent investigation similar results were obtained for $l/d=2.5$ and $l/d=5.0$. The effect of capsule size was seen to be have a greater effect, with $r/d=0.75$ unsurprisingly resulting in the greatest deviation from a flow field with no capsule, however capsules with size $r/d=0.25$ were also seen to affect the flow field.
Capsule membranes constrain the flow internally, and since the stress field must be continuous across the capsule membrane, the effect is to locally homogenise (i.e. create greater uniformity) the velocity field. This can be seen as a local increase in apparent viscosity. When multiple capsules were investigated, the inter-capsule interaction, caused the capsules to effectively act as a single larger body. This resulted in an increased apparent viscosity spanning the region of the capsules. This effect was clearly observed as the capsules flow in the narrow channel, for which the apparent viscosity resembled that of a shear-thinning non-Newtonian rheological model. An effect of the local increased viscosity is also the cause that the leading capsule tends to move faster than the other two trailing capsules.
The effect of the multiple capsules is to reduce the perimeter change, due to their wakes and inter-capsule interaction which reduces the shear rate (i.e. velocity gradients) of the fluid integrated over the capsule surface. This then leads to a decrease in overall strain for the capsule membrane. The capsule at the trailing edge however is not shielded and its wake promotes a vortex ring in the relative velocity field, and its perimeter change is the same as that of a single capsule flow.
Lastly, we highlight that while the two-dimensional results reported here are representative of the analogous three-dimensional problem, due to the symmetry and regimes (based on capillary and Reynolds numbers) of the set-up, this is generally not the case. Indeed, in complex systems such as a general set-up where deformable capsules are injected into a reservoir, not only is the mechanics of the jet collapse different between two and three dimensions, importantly also the specific stresses involved in the fluid-structure interactions will differ. This noted, two-dimensional simulations can still provide fruitful information on the regulating biophysical mechanisms without the inconvenience of the computationally intense three-dimensional simulations. The extension of the current physical problem to three-dimensional modelling is certainly of interest and will be the object of future investigations.
\section*{References}
\bibliographystyle{unsrtnat}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 0 |
\section{Introduction}
The currently accepted theory for gravity -- general relativity -- is not compatible with
quantum field theory, the conceptual framework which the standard model of particle physics builds on.
Therefore, general relativity is today understood as an effective theory that is
only approximately correct. At high energies it needs to be completed, in a mathematically
consistent way, both to render it renormalizable and to couple it to quantum fields.
While solving this problem does not mean that gravity necessarily must be quantized, we will here -- as is common in the literature --
refer to the sought-after UV-completion as `quantum gravity.'
While the effects of quantum gravity are expected to be strong only in regimes where
the curvature is close by the Planck scale, not all deviations from general relativity are
relevant only at high energies. Symmetry
violations in particular are known to impact low energy physics even if they originate
in the ultra-violet, amply demonstrated for example by Lorentz-invariance violation \cite{Mattingly:2005re}.
In general
relativity, one assumes that space-time is described by a differentiable manifold
giving rise to local conservation laws. If the underlying theory of
quantum gravity does not respect this symmetry -- and there is no reason why it
should -- then local conservation laws can be violated. Indeed, one should
generically expect this to be the case.
In absence of a fully-fledged theory for quantum gravity, one cannot derive observable
consequences. One can, however, quantify them by help of phenomenological models.
In \cite{Hossenfelder:2013yda,Hossenfelder:2013zda}, a framework for space-time
defects was developed that respects global Lorentz-invariance. In this framework,
local space-time defects couple to particles through random kicks that change the
particle's momentum which is mathematically encoded in a stochastic contribution
to the derivative operator.
Space-time defects have been discussed in the literature for some time \cite{Klinkhamer:2003ec,Schreck:2012pf,Klinkhamer:2017nhl}. Older
models are not (locally) Lorentz-invariant and are now in tension
with data. We will not consider these here. Some newer models respect Lorentz-invariance but rely on additional
exchange fields to couple Standard Model particles to the defects. We will not consider this case here
either. Instead, we will in this paper extend
the approach proposed in \cite{Hossenfelder:2013yda,Hossenfelder:2013zda}
which respects local Lorentz-invariance and does not necessitate additional fields.
In the following we will generalize the previously developed
phenomenological model for local space-time defects to curved backgrounds.
As we will show, this implies a modification of Einstein's field equations by a change of the
covariant derivative. We will then go on to derive the field equations for the defects' average
density. Knowing the time-dependence of the defect-density with the expansion of
the universe is relevant input to understanding possible phenomenological
consequences.
Throughout this paper we use units in which $c=\hbar=1$. The signature
of the metric is $(1,-1,-1,-1)$, and the dimension of the manifold is $4$. Small
Greek indices run from $0$ to $3$. Bold-faced quantities denote tensors
whose coordinate components are given by the respective symbol with
indices. Eg, ${\bf p}$ denotes the vector with components $p_\mu$, ${\bf g}$
is the two-tensor with entries $g_{\kappa \nu}$ and so on.
\section{Local Defects in Flat Space}
For the benefit of the reader, we will first briefly summarize the model for
local space-time defects developed in \cite{Hossenfelder:2013zda}.
We start
with the assumption of Poincar\'e-invariance. For the distribution of defects
in space-time we use the (only known) stochastic distribution that is
-- on the average -- both homogeneous and Lorentz-invariant \cite{Bombelli:2006nm}. It is a
Poission-distribution according to which the probability to find $N$ defects in a four-volume $V$ of spacetime is
\begin{align}
P_N(V)=\, \frac{(\beta V)^N\,\exp(-\beta V)}{N!}~.
\label{probability of sprinkling N points}
\end{align}
We then have to parameterize what happens at a defect. It was assumed in \cite{Hossenfelder:2013zda},
that defects induce a violation of energy-momentum conservation because they represent
a deviation from the smooth structure of the underlying manifold. A particle (or wave) with incoming
momentum ${\bf p}$ will scatter on the defect and exit with momentum ${\bf p}'$.
The difference between the two momenta, ${\bf k} := {\bf p}' - {\bf p}$, can formally be assigned to
the defect. However, we want to emphasize that assigning this momentum to the defect is merely for book-keeping
and does not mean
the defect actually carries a momentum in any physically meaningful way.
The change of momentum that happens at a defect is assumed to be stochastically distributed. The requirement
of Lorentz-invariance then implies that this distribution can only be a function of the
three invariants:
\beqn
p_\nu p^\nu = m^2~,~k_\nu p^\nu = M^2~,~ k_\nu k^\nu = a^2 M^2~,
\eeqn
where $m$ is the mass of the incident particle (and may be equal to zero), $M$ is a parameter of dimension mass, and
$a$ is a dimensionless constant expected to be of order one.
Importantly, the direction of the outgoing momentum ${\bf p}'$ (or its distribution,
respectively) is a function of
the ingoing momentum. For this reason, the defects do not introduce a preferred
frame. While the scattering at a defect has a preferred direction, this direction is
entirely determined by the incoming particle. It is in this exact way that the model preserves local Lorentz-invariance: It does
not introduce a fundamental preferred frame. To the extent that a frame is preferred,
this frame is -- as usual -- defined by the dynamics of matter fields.
Finally, the coupling of matter to the defects is made by replacing the
usual partial derivative, $\partial_\nu$, with $\partial_\nu + W_\nu$, where
$W_\nu$ is a vector-valued random variable, defined on the point-set of defects,
with the probability distribution of $k_\nu$ at each point.
With these ingredients, one can write down a modified Lagrangian for matter
coupled to the defects and calculate cross-sections.
As was shown in \cite{Hossenfelder:2013zda}, the observational consequences of
defects become more pronounced the smaller the energy of the particle that is
being scattered, and the longer its travel time. To be more precise, what matters is not the travel-time but the world-volume
swept out by the wave-function -- a direct consequence of requiring
Poincar\'e-invariance,
This means that the best constraints on defects come from cosmological data. However,
to analyze cosmological data, it is necessary to deal with an expanding background.
We will therefore here further develop the model so that we can deal with
curved space-time and study Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmologies in
particular. The most important question we would like to address is how the average
density of space-time defects changes with time.
\section{Local Defects in Curved Space}
We now turn towards the main purpose of the paper, the question how to generalize
the model for local space-time defects to a curved background.
\subsection{The Connection}
In flat space, we coupled quantum fields to defects by adding
localized, stochastic contributions to the partial derivative. This is
straight-forward to generalize to curved space-time by instead adding
these contributions to the covariant derivative. For this purpose,
we define a new derivative
\beqn
\widetilde { \nabla} := {\nabla} + {\bf Q}~,
\eeqn
where ${\nabla}$ is the usual Levi-Civita-connection, ie the unique
connection that is both metric-compatible
and torsion-free.
We want to
inflict a minimum of harm on general relativity and hence require
that the new derivative, $\widetilde \nabla$, is generally covariant. This
means that the additional term ${\bf Q}$ is (unlike the
Christoffel-symbols) a three-tensor. The new derivative, however, is
no longer the usual Levi-Civita-connection.
Since torsion has no effect on the geodesic equation, we will in the following
not take it into account. (See, however, the discussion in section \ref{disc}). We will hence assume
that $\widetilde \nabla$ is torsion-free, ie that
\begin{align}
\widetilde{\nabla}_X Y-\widetilde{\nabla}_Y X-\,[X,Y]=0~,
\label{torsionfreecondition 1}
\end{align}
for arbitrary vector fields $X,Y$.
In coordinate notation this means that the connection coefficients $\widetilde \Gamma$ that belong to
$\widetilde \nabla$ are of the form
\beqn
\widetilde\Gamma^\kappa_{\;\nu\mu} = \Gamma^\kappa_{\;\nu\mu} + Q^\kappa_{\;\nu\mu}~,
\label{relation Gamma tilde Gamma}
\eeqn
where
${\bf Q}$ must be symmetric in the lower two indices
\beqn
Q^\kappa_{\;\;\nu\mu} = Q^\kappa_{\;\;\mu\nu}~.
\eeqn
The non-metricity tensor ${\bf Q}$ can be expressed as
\beqn
g_{\sigma \tau} Q^{\tau}_{\; \;\mu \nu} = - \frac{1}{2} \left( \widetilde \nabla_\mu g_{\nu \sigma} + \widetilde \nabla_\nu g_{\mu \sigma}
- \widetilde \nabla_\sigma g_{\mu \nu} \right) ~. \label{qcyc}
\eeqn
Similar to the case of flat space, we will then assume that a defect imparts
a stochastic kick on an incoming particle and that the kick's distribution (though not its value) is entirely determined by the outgoing
momentum. We will hence assume that ${\bf Q}$ is proportional to the vector-valued
random variable
${\bf W}$ that has support on the set of defects. Together with torsion-freeness and the index structure Eq.~(\ref{qcyc}),
this means ${\bf Q}$ must be of the form
\beqn
Q^\rho_{\;\;\mu \nu} =
\,\frac{1}{2}\left(W_\mu\,\delta^\rho_{\;\nu}+
\,W_\nu\,\delta^\rho_{\;\mu}-\,W^\rho g_{\mu\nu}\right)~,\label{QW}
\eeqn
where we have absorbed a possible pre-factor into ${\bf W}$.
Such a modification of the covariant derivative has an interesting physical interpretation,
which is a non-conservation of the volume element, $\sqrt{-g}$,
where $g=\rm{det} ( {\bf g}) $. To see this, recall that usually $\nabla g = 0$ and
note that the local relation
\begin{align}
\partial_\lambda \ln (-g)=\,\frac{1}{g}\,\partial_\lambda g=\,g^{\mu\sigma}\,\partial_\lambda\,g_{\sigma\mu}
\label{partical derivative of the determinant}
\end{align}
is fulfilled regardless of what the connection is.
With use of Eq.~\eqref{partical derivative of the determinant}, we can calculate the
new covariant derivative of the volume element:
\beqn
\frac{1}{-g}\,\widetilde\nabla_\lambda (-g) & =& g^{\mu\sigma}\,\widetilde\nabla_\lambda g_{\sigma\mu} \nonumber \\
& =&g^{\mu\sigma}\,\left(\nabla_\lambda g_{\sigma\mu} - Q^\rho_{\; \;\lambda\sigma}g_{\mu\rho}-Q^\rho_{\; \;\lambda\mu}g_{\rho\sigma}\right) \nonumber \\
& =& - 2 Q^\rho_{\; \; \lambda\rho}~,
\eeqn
where we have used that $\nabla_\lambda g_{\sigma\rho}=0$.
This can be rewritten as
\beqn
\frac{1}{{-g}} \widetilde\nabla_\lambda( {-g}) = - 2 W_\lambda~. \label{volel}
\eeqn
We hence see that this connection's vector-valued non-preservation
of the volume-element is a natural way to describe space-time defects because it induces a violation of energy-momentum conservation, an effect that comes with space-time defects \cite{Hossenfelder:2013yda,Hossenfelder:2013zda}.
Indeed, it was
demonstrated in \cite{tHooft:2008mxs,Arzano:2014nwa,Wieland:2016exy,vandeMeent:2011wr} that conical
space-time singularities have properties similar to the ones associated with space-time
defect: a) space-time is flat except for one point, b) at that one point the curvature is divergent and hence
ill-defined,
and c) passing by near the singularity/defect imparts a momentum on the particle that can
be expressed as a locally acting Lorentz-boost.
While the conical singularities are examples the reader might
want to keep in mind, we would like to emphasize that the defects we consider here differ
from conical singularities in that they do not have a fixed orientation, but rather a distribution
over orientations that depend on the momentum of the incident particle.
The connection $\widetilde{\nabla}$ can also be expressed as
\beqn
\widetilde{\nabla}_\rho g_{\mu\nu}= W_\rho g_{\mu\nu}~,
\label{projective metric compatibility}
\eeqn
which has previously been discussed in the literature under the name `projective metric compatibility' or `vector non-metricity' \cite{HehlLordSmalley, Gasperini,Stelmach}.
The new derivative $\widetilde \nabla$ has a curvature-tensor associated
to it, which is as usual (following the convention of \cite{Wald}) defined by the commutator of the covariant derivatives of
an arbitrary $1$-form ${\bf A}$:
\beqn
[ \widetilde \nabla_\sigma, \widetilde \nabla_\kappa] A_\alpha := \widetilde R^{\mu}_{\; \; \sigma \kappa \alpha} A_{\mu}~.
\eeqn
From this curvature tensor, we can construct the curvature scalar,
which will serve as the Lagrangian for our modified theory of gravity.
\subsection{The Lagrangian for Gravity Coupled to Defects}
Since we have an additional vector field that describes the covariant
derivative, we will use the Palatini-formalism to derive the equations of
motion.
In the Palatini-formalism, one makes an independent variation over the metric
and the connection separately.
If one uses the Einstein-Hilbert action (ie, the curvature scalar) and assumes that the
connection is torsion-free (as we have done), then the additional equations one obtains in the
Palatini-formalism require the connection to also be metric-compatible.
One may think this
is because in the Palatini-formalism the Einstein-Hilbert action is no longer the unique
choice since there are various other terms that can be constructed from the connection,
for example those composed of covariant derivatives of the volume-element. But interestingly,
as was shown in \cite{Burton-Mann}, even with the additional terms added,
the Palatini-formalism gives back General Relativity under quite general circumstances.
However, a central assumption for the conclusion in \cite{Burton-Mann} is that the Lagrangian
of the matter fields does not make a contribution to the constraint equations for the
connection that are derived from the Palatini-formalism. This, however, will in general
not be the case. While a gauge-field effectively only cares about the partial derivative
so long as the connection is torsion-free because the field-strength tensor is
anti-symmetric, this is not the case for fermion fields.
We will hence use the formalism of \cite{Burton-Mann}, but add matter sources. For simplicity, we
will restrict the analysis presented here to a single Dirac field with mass $m$, though our approach
can easily be extended to more general cases.
For a Dirac field, the covariant derivative is defined by help of the spin connection (see for instance \cite{Pollock}). It can be constructed from the tetrad, $e^a_{\; \mu}$, and the connection, $\widetilde{\nabla}$, by the relation
\begin{align}
\widetilde w^{ab}_{~~~\mu} := \,e_{\nu}^{\; \; a}
\widetilde{\Gamma}^\nu_{\;\;\sigma \mu}\,e^{\sigma b}+ e_{\nu}^{\; \; a} \partial_\mu e^{\nu b}~.
\label{spin connection 1}
\end{align}
This spin connection acts on sections of the bundle of Dirac spinors and determines the covariant derivative operator by
\begin{align}
\widetilde D_\mu= \partial_\mu-\frac{\rm i}{4}\widetilde w^{ab}_{~~~\mu}\,[\gamma_a,\gamma_b]~.
\label{spin derivative}
\end{align}
Using Eqs.~\eqref{relation Gamma tilde Gamma} and (\ref{QW}) this can be expressed in terms of ${\bf W}$ as:
\beqn
\widetilde{D}_\mu = D_\mu -\frac{\rm i}{4}\,e_{\mu}^{\; \; a}\,e^{\sigma b}W_\sigma \,[\gamma_a,\gamma_b]~,
\eeqn
where $D_\mu$ is the spin connection associated with the usual Levi-Civita connection, $\nabla$.
The Lagrangian for the Dirac field is then
\beqn
{\cal L}_{\rm M} =
\frac{\rm i}{2} \left(\overline{\psi} \gamma^{\; \mu} D_\mu \psi - \overline{D_\mu \psi} \gamma^{\; \mu} \psi \right) -m\overline{\psi}\psi+ \frac{1}{2} e_\mu^{\;\;a} e^{\sigma b} W_\sigma \overline{\psi} [\gamma_a,\gamma_b]\,\gamma^{\;\mu} \psi ~.
\eeqn
The generalization of the ansatz from \cite{Burton-Mann} with the addition of a Dirac field therefore starts
with the action
\beqn
S[g, \widetilde \Gamma, \psi ] &=& \int {\rm d}^4 x \sqrt{-g} \big( \frac{1}{16\pi G} \big(\widetilde{R} +
C_1(\widetilde{\nabla}_\nu g^{\mu\rho})(\widetilde{\nabla}^\nu g_{\mu\rho})+ C_2 V_\rho V^\rho \nonumber \\
&& + C_3(\widetilde{\nabla}_\rho g_{\mu\nu})(\widetilde{\nabla}^\mu g^{\rho \nu})+ C_4 V_\rho Z^\rho+ C_5 Z_\rho Z^\rho \big)+ \cal{L}_{\rm M} \big)~, \label{BMaction}
\eeqn
where $C_1,C_2,C_3, C_4, C_5$ are dimensionless constants and
\begin{align}
V_\rho=\,\frac{1}{\sqrt{- g}} \widetilde{\nabla}_\rho \sqrt{-g}\quad,\quad Z^\mu=\widetilde{\nabla}_\rho g^{\rho\mu}~. \label{this1}
\end{align}
For the case of vector non-metricity, the two vectors ${\bf V}$ and ${\bf Z}$ from \cite{Burton-Mann} are:
\beqn
V_\nu = - W_\nu ~,~ Z_\nu= - W_\nu~. \label{ZandV}
\eeqn
By use of the relations (\ref{this1}) and (\ref{ZandV}) one convinces oneself that the additional terms
in the action Eq.\ (\ref{BMaction}) are all propotional to each other. The five different constants therefore
can be replaced with merely one constant that is a linear combination of $C_1$ to $C_5$.
One obtains the field equations from variation of the action with respect to the metric and then inserting the relations (\ref{ZandV}). This results in
\beqn
{R}_{\mu\nu}-\frac{1}{2}R g_{\mu\nu}-2\left(\nabla_\mu W_\nu+\nabla_\nu W_\mu\right)+2 g_{\mu\nu}\nabla_\alpha W^\alpha+ (8+C)W_\mu W_\nu+ 4g_{\mu\nu}W^2= 8\pi G T_{\mu\nu}~,
\label{general field equations}
\eeqn
where $C$ is a dimensionless constant that is the (not so relevant) linear combination of the constants in Eq.~(\ref{BMaction}).
In (\ref{general field equations}) the Ricci tensor, $R_{\mu\nu}$, and the scalar curvature, $R$, are the ones associated with the Levi-Civita connection, and the stress-energy tensor is, as usual, defined by
\beqn
T_{\mu\nu} := - 2 \frac{\delta {\cal L}_{\rm M}}{\delta g_{\mu\nu}} + g_{\mu \nu} {\cal L}_{\rm M}~.
\eeqn
The field equations obtained this way are identical to the ones derived in \cite{Gasperini,Stelmach}.
The Dirac field $\psi$ satisfies the equation
\beqn
{\rm i}\gamma^{\; \mu} D_\mu\,{\psi}+ \frac{1}{2}\,e_\mu^{\;\;a}\,e^{\sigma b} W_\sigma [\gamma_a,\gamma_b]\,\gamma^{\; \mu} \psi -m\psi=0~,
\label{Fermion equation 1}
\eeqn
and the conjugate field obeys the respective conjugated equation.
The Euler-Lagrange equation for ${\widetilde \Gamma}$ together with (\ref{ZandV}) leads to the relation
\beqn
\frac{1}{2} e^a_{\;\;\mu} e^{\sigma b} \overline{\psi}\gamma^{\; \mu} [\gamma_a,\gamma_b]\psi + 2 C \frac{1}{16\pi G} W^\sigma=0~. \label{Weq}
\eeqn
One sees clearly that in the absence of the matter field, this would merely lead to the conclusion that
${\bf W} \equiv 0$, so that we would be returned to normal general relativity. This is the
conclusion drawn in \cite{Burton-Mann}. However, in the
presence of matter fields, this is not necessarily so; in this case, ${\bf W}$ may be non-vanishing.
With some algebraic manipulations, Eq.~(\ref{Weq}) can be simplified to
\begin{align}
C W_\nu = - 24 \pi G J_\nu~ ,
\label{equationforW}
\end{align}
where $J_\nu=\overline{\psi}\,\gamma_\nu \psi$ is the vector current.
This relation, most importantly, implies that ${\bf W}$ is entirely determined
by the matter fields.
We therefore see that the presence of space-time defects
induces an order six operator, suppressed by the (square of the) Planck mass, that effectively gives rise to a four-fermion coupling.
The vector-field ${\bf W}$ can be removed from the matter-field's equation
of motion Eq.~\eqref{Fermion equation 1} which gives
\begin{align}
{\rm i} \gamma^{\; \mu} D_\mu
{\psi}+ 12\frac{1}{C} \pi G (\overline{\psi} \gamma_\mu \psi) \gamma^{\; \mu} \psi- m\psi=0~
\label{Fermion equation 2}
\end{align}
and its hermitian conjugate.
We note that this result bears similarity to the {\sc BCS} condensates discussed in \cite{Alexander:2008vt,Poplawski:2011wj}, where a four-fermion interaction was induced by torsion. However, torsion leads to a coupling with the axial current, whereas we have a coupling with the vector current that stems directly from the vector which quantifies the non-metricity.
\subsection{Conservation of the current}
In the action Eq.~(\ref{BMaction}), no derivatives acting on ${\bf W}$ appeared. That is fortunate because
we had defined ${\bf W}$ only on a discrete set of points. The observant reader will have noticed, however,
that to derive the field equations Eqs.~(\ref{general field equations}), we have assumed that
the field is differentiable in order to make sense of derivatives acting on it. We have allowed ourselves
this freedom because, in the next section on cosmology, we will deal
with the field's expectation value rather than the random variable itself. In this case, then, it is meaningful to
speak about derivatives. For this reason, we will here also briefly look at the conservation
laws that are obeyed on the average.
The equation of motion for the Dirac field \eqref{Fermion equation 2} and its hermitian conjugate imply a conservation
law that is analogous to the usual conservation of the current. We have not included gauge-fields here, but we still
have a conservation law stemming from the global U$(1)$ symmetry. From the modified Dirac equation we obtain
\beqn
\nabla_\mu W^\mu & =& 24
\pi G \frac{1}{C}\left(D_\mu(\overline{ \psi})\gamma^{\; \mu} \psi+ \overline{\psi}\gamma^{\; \mu} D_\mu\psi\right)= 0~ .\label{conservation law}
\eeqn
where we have used $D_\mu \gamma_{\rho}=0$ \cite{Pollock}.
\subsection{Bianchi identities and violation of stress-energy conservation}
Next, we will look at the conservation of the stress-energy tensor which, in general relativity, is a direct consequence
of the Bianchi-identities. We expect this conservation law to be modified, but also that it must be possible to
construct a new, modified, conservation law.
For torsion-free connections, the second Bianchi identities can be expressed in local coordinates as \cite{Kobayashi-Nomizu,Wald}
\beqn
\widetilde{\nabla}_\lambda \widetilde{R}^{\nu}_{\; \rho\sigma \mu} + \widetilde{\nabla}_\rho \widetilde{R}^{\nu}_{\;\sigma \lambda \mu} + \widetilde{\nabla}_\sigma \widetilde{R}^{\nu}_{\; \lambda \rho \mu} = 0 ~.
\label{second Biachi identity}
\eeqn
This relation is valid for any torsion-free affine connection, like the one we are using here (see for example Theorem 5.3. in \cite{Kobayashi-Nomizu}).
The contracted Bianchi identities are obtained by first taking the trace of the above expression. This results in
\beqn
\widetilde{\nabla}_\lambda \widetilde{R}^{\lambda}_{\;\;\rho\sigma \mu} + \widetilde{\nabla}_\rho \widetilde{R}_{\sigma\mu} - \widetilde{\nabla}_\sigma \widetilde{R}_{\rho \mu} = 0 ~, \label{step1}
\eeqn
where, as usual, the Ricci-tensor is defined by $\widetilde R_{\mu\nu} = \widetilde R^\kappa_{\;\;\mu \kappa \nu}$, and
we have used the cyclicity of the curvature-tensor
\beqn
R^\nu_{\; [ \kappa \mu \lambda ]} = 0~,
\eeqn
which also holds in the absence of torsion.
Next, we contract Eq.~(\ref{step1}) with $g^{\rho \mu}$ and obtain
\beqn
\widetilde{\nabla}_\lambda (\widetilde{R}^{\lambda}_{\;\; \rho\sigma \mu}g^{\rho\mu})
+ \widetilde{\nabla}_\rho (\widetilde{R}^\lambda_{\; \;\sigma\lambda\mu}g^{\rho\mu}) -
\widetilde{\nabla}_\sigma \widetilde{R} = -( \widetilde{R}^{\lambda}_{\; \;\rho \sigma\mu}\widetilde{\nabla}_\lambda g^{\rho\mu}+\,\widetilde{R}^{\lambda}_{\; \; \sigma\lambda\mu} \widetilde{\nabla}_\rho g^{\rho\mu}- \widetilde{R}_{\rho \mu}\,\widetilde{\nabla}_\sigma g^{\rho\mu})~.
\eeqn
By using the relation
\beqn
\widetilde{\nabla}_\lambda g^{\rho\mu}= -W_\lambda g^{\rho\mu}~,
\eeqn
the contracted Bianchi identities can be expressed in terms of ${\bf W}$ as
\beqn
\widetilde{\nabla}_\lambda \widetilde{R}^{\lambda}_{\; \; \rho\sigma}{}^{\rho} + \widetilde{\nabla}_\rho \widetilde{R}^\lambda_{\; \; \sigma\lambda}{}^\rho -\, \widetilde{\nabla}_\sigma \widetilde{R}=
W_\lambda \widetilde{R}^{\lambda}_{\; \;\rho\sigma}{}^\rho + W_\rho \widetilde{R}_{\sigma}^{\;\;\rho}- W_\sigma \widetilde{R}~. \label{conslaw1}
\eeqn
The terms on the left side of Eq.~(\ref{conslaw1}) can be written as
$2 \widetilde \nabla_\lambda \widetilde G^\lambda_{\;\; \sigma}$
for a generalized Einstein-tensor
\beqn
2 \widetilde G_{\mu \nu} = \widetilde{R}_{\mu \rho\nu}{}^{\rho} + \widetilde{R}^\rho_{\;\; \nu\rho \mu} - g_{\mu \nu} \widetilde{R}~.
\eeqn
The field equations obtained by a variation of $g_{\mu\nu}$ in the action are of the form
\beqn
\widetilde{G}_{\lambda\sigma} + CW_\lambda W_\sigma= 8\pi G T_{\lambda\sigma}.
\label{Einstein equations 2}
\eeqn
This, in combination with the contracted Bianchi identity, finally leads to the new conservation law
\beqn
8 \pi G \widetilde{\nabla}^\mu T_{\mu\nu} = W^\mu \widetilde{G}_{\mu\nu}+C\,\widetilde{\nabla}^\mu (W_\mu W_\nu)~. \label{setconsnew}
\eeqn
Alternatively, we can take the ${\bf W}$-dependent terms that stem from the curvature in Eq.~(\ref{general field equations}) and
assign them a new tensor
\beqn
\tau_{\mu \nu} := 2\left(\nabla_\mu W_\nu+\nabla_\nu W_\mu\right)-2 g_{\mu\nu}\nabla_\alpha W^\alpha- (8+C)W_\mu W_\nu- 4g_{\mu\nu}W^2 ~. \label{tau}
\eeqn
The interpretation of this tensor is the stress-energy associated with the defects. The sum of this tensor and the usual
stress-energy-tensor then obeys the normal conservation law
\beqn
{\nabla}^\mu \left( 8 \pi G T_{\mu\nu} + \tau_{\mu \nu} \right) = 0~,
\eeqn
but generically neither term is separately conserved.
\section{Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetimes with defects}
In this section we will look at cosmology with space-time defects. To that end, we will assume
isotropy and homogeneity are fulfilled on the average. In particular, we will promote ${\bf W}$ from
being a random variable defined only on a set of points to a differentiable vector field. The vector
field should not be interpreted as encoding the number-density of defects. It encodes the average
energy and momentum that is transferred by the defects. From this field, we will derive the
average stress-energy tensor associated with the presence of the defects
which acts as a source-term for the field equations. This, then, will allow us to calculate
the time-dependence of the field itself by solving the field-equations.
The distance scale at which this approximation should be appropriate is for space-time
volumes in which
there is a large number of defects, but that is still much smaller than the fourth power of
the curvature radius, ie $\ll 1/\Lambda^{2}$, where $\Lambda$ is the cosmological constant.
Since the typical density of nodes in a space-time that is fundamentally made
from a network should be set by the Planck-scale, there are many orders of
magnitude in which this limit is good. Indeed, in
\cite{Hossenfelder:2013yda,Hossenfelder:2013zda}, it was found that constraints
from Minkowski space limit the density merely to be smaller than about an inverse femtometer to
the fourth power.
It is not a priori clear whether the use of average values to describe the universe
on cosmological scales is justified
because the field equations of gravity are non-linear. This is a well-known problem in
general relativity
and we do not have anything new to say about it. For details the reader may refer to the review \cite{Bolejko:2016qku}.
We will here, as common in the literature,
simply work with the averages in the hope that this debate will be
resolved at some point.
\subsection{Derivation of Friedmann-equations}
We start with the ansatz for a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker ({\sc FRW}) metric
\beqn
{\rm d}s^2 = {\rm d}t^2 - a(t)^2 \left( \frac{{\rm d}r^2}{1-kr^2} + {\rm d} \Omega^2 \right)~,
\label{Robertson-Walker}
\eeqn
where $k \in \{-1,0.1 \}$ is the constant curvature on spatial hypersurfaces. For ${\bf W}$, we make the ansatz $(Y(t),0,0,0)$, and for the stress-energy tensor we assume the common form of a perfect fluid
\beqn
T^\mu_{\;\; \nu}= {\rm{diag}} (\rho, -p,-p,-p)~.
\label{fluid tensor}
\eeqn
One could make a more general ansatz for ${\bf W}$ in which the spatial components do not vanish, but one would find
later that the field equations demand they do vanish because such components would induce off-diagonal entries.
Now, onto the field equations. The off-diagonal equations are automatically fulfilled since ${\bf W}$ only has a
zero-component which is a function of $t$ alone. The first and second Friedmann-equation read:
\beqn
\left( \frac{\dot{a}}{a} \right)^2 &=& \frac{8}{3}\pi G \rho - \frac{k}{a^2} - 2 \frac{\dot{a}}{a} Y + \frac{2}{3} \dot Y - (4+C/3) Y^2~, \label{Friedmanneq1}\\
\frac{\ddot{a}}{a} &=& -4\pi G\left(p+\frac{\rho}{3}\right) - \frac{4}{3} \dot Y + \frac{C}{6} Y^2 ~.
\label{Friedmanneq2}
\eeqn
The reader will note immediately that these equations differ from the usual Friedmann-equations not only
by the additional sources, but by the relation between the sources. The
reason is that the sources do not fulfill the usual conservation law, but the modified one Eq.~(\ref{setconsnew}). Since
the violation of (the usual) stress-energy conservation was the point of our exercise, let us make this
important consistency check explicitly. For the isotropic and homogeneous ansatz, the zero-component of the
conservation law reads:
\beqn
4 \pi G \left( \dot{\rho}+ 3 \frac{\dot{a}}{a} (\rho + p ) \right) = (C+12) Y \dot Y + \ddot Y + 3 \left( \frac{\ddot a}{a} +
\left(\frac{\dot a}{a} \right)^2 \right) Y + \frac{3(8+C)}{2} \frac{\dot a}{a} Y^2 ~.
\eeqn
(The other equations vanish identically.)
One confirms easily that when one takes the time-derivative of the first Friedmann-equation and inserts this
modified conservation law, one obtains -- correctly -- the second Friedmann-equation.
To solve the modified Friedmann-equations Eqs.~(\ref{Friedmanneq1}) and (\ref{Friedmanneq2}), we draw upon the equation which we derived for the conserved current, Eq.~\eqref{conservation law}.
For the {\sc FRW} case, this leads to the simple relation
\beqn
\dot{Y}= - 3 Y \frac{\dot a}{a}~.
\label{conservation law 2}
\eeqn
which has the solution
\beqn
Y(t) = \frac{Y_0}{a(t)^3}~, \label{Ysol}
\eeqn
where $Y_0$ is some initial value.
Next, we insert this expression into the first Friedmann-equation (\ref{Friedmanneq1}) which gives
\beqn
\left( \frac{\dot{a}}{a} \right)^2
&=& \frac{8}{3}\pi G \rho - \frac{k}{a^2} - 4 Y_0 \frac{\dot a}{a^4} - (4+C/3) \frac{Y_0}{a^6}~. \label{adota}
\eeqn
This equation can now be solved for $\rho$, and the solution, together with Eq.~(\ref{Ysol}), can be inserted
into the second Friedmann equation (\ref{Friedmanneq2}). This decouples the system. The resulting
equations
\beqn
8 \pi G \rho(t) &=& 3 \left( \frac{\dot a}{a} \right)^2 - (C+12) \frac{Y_0^2 }{a^6} - 12 Y_0 \frac{\dot a}{a^4}~ + \frac{3k}{a^2}~,
\label{rhoeq}\\
\frac{\ddot{a}}{a} &=& - \frac{1}{2} \left( \frac{\dot a}{a} \right)^2 - \frac{k}{2 a^2} -2 \frac{Y_0^2 }{a^6} + 2 Y_0 \frac{\dot a}{a^4}~\label{ddota}.
\eeqn
can be integrated numerically, which we will do in the next section.
\subsection{Results}
In this subsection we display the results of a numerical integration of Eq.~(\ref{adota}). In the
previous subsection we derived the general equations valid for any equation of state, but here we
will examine in particular a flat and matter-dominated universe, ie we will set $k=0$ and $p=0$.
The latter choice means that we neglect the presence of radiation.
Our solutions
will then depend on various parameters. First, there are the initial values for the scale-factor and the energy-density,
$a_0$ and $\rho_0$. While these affect the quantitative result, they are not relevant for the scaling
of the solution with $t$. We moreover have the constant $C$ that determines how strongly
the additional terms contribute, and the initial value $Y_0$ for $Y(t)$ from Eq.~(\ref{Ysol}) .
Let us begin with some general considerations. The second term on the right side of Eq.(\ref{rhoeq}) and
the second term on the right side of Eq.~(\ref{ddota}) go with
$1/a^{6}$ and therefore will become irrelevant compared with the other terms quickly. The leading
deviation from the usual case therefore goes with $\dot a/a^4$. Assuming that $\dot a$ as
usual decreases, these contributions too are subdominant to the usual term. In this case,
we can expect that approximately $a \dot a^2 \sim$ constant and the correction terms scale
as $a^{-9/2}$.
For the integration we will use
initial conditions so that at the present time, $t_0$, we have $8 \pi G \rho_0 = 1$ and $a_0 = 1$, ie the density and scale factor are
measured in relative to today's density and scale factor.
Because of the above mentioned scaling considerations, we further use initial conditions with
$Y_0^2 \ll 8 \pi G \rho_0$. This is justified if we assume that both -- the energy-density of matter and that in the defects -- started out about the
same value at some early time, say, at the Planck time. Relative to the baryonic density, the
leading term in $00$-component of the stress-energy of the defects Eq.~(\ref{tau}) will get an additional drop from $\dot a/a
\sim \sqrt{\Lambda}/m_{\rm p}$, where $\Lambda$ is the cosmological constant and $m_{\rm p}$ is the Planck scale. This
means if $Y$ started with a value $Y_{\rm p} \sim m_{\rm p}$ at Planckian times, then today it will be at $Y_0 \sim \sqrt{\Lambda}^3/m_{\rm p}^2$. A realistic value would be $Y_0 \sim 10^{-29}$,
but that would make a numerical treatment infeasible. Instead, we will use more manageable values of $\sim 10^{-2}$
that illustrate the behavior more clearly.
In Figure \ref{fig1} we show the dependence of the solution for the scale-factor on the initial value $Y_0$, for a selected
value of $C=1$. One sees, as expected,
that the curves track each other around the present time $t/t_0 = 1$ and diverge away from that.
The larger $Y_0$ the stronger the divergence. While not clearly visible in the plot, all curves approach
the same (usual) scaling behavior at large $t$.
In Figure \ref{fig2} we plot the matter density multiplied by the 3-volume,
$\rho a^3$, which for usual
{\sc FRW} case is a constant. We can see that, here too, the solutions closely track each other at present
times. At large times they all become constant.
The dependence of the curves on $C$ is rather uninteresting, though that in itself is interesting. The
constant $C$ only makes a noticeable difference if it is comparable to or larger than $1/Y_0^2$, and
then it does not lead to qualitatively new behavior but slightly shifts the curves up and down.
\begin{figure}[th]
\centering
\vspace*{-1.3cm}\hspace*{0.5cm}
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{scalefactor01.eps
\vspace*{-1cm}
\caption{Scalefactor for $C=1$ and different values of $Y_0$. The solid (black) curve shows the
usual {\sc FRW} case with a big bang singularity. \label{fig1}}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[th]
\centering
\vspace*{-1.3cm}\hspace*{1cm}
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{density.eps}
\vspace*{-1cm}
\hspace*{2cm}\caption{Density times volume for $C=1$ and different values of $Y_0$. \label{fig2}}
\end{figure}
\section{Discussion}
\label{disc}
We note that both in Causal Sets as also in Spin-Foam approaches to
quantum gravity, the density of nodes in the network describes the
volume. Since we have seen from Eq.~(\ref{volel}) that the formalism
used here describes a change in the volume-element, it might therefore
also be useful to study fluctuations of the volume-measure around
the mean value.
Further, we note that in the treatment presented here the defects do not couple to gauge
fields. This is because the symmetric part of the connection does not appear in
the field-strength tensor. For this reason, one does not reproduce the
previously considered flat-space
model in which it was assumed that the modified connection also couples
to the gauge fields.
In principle one can look at the general case with non-metricity and torsion.
But before doing so it would make more sense to tighten the relation between
space-time defects and particular changes to the covariant derivative. While
we believe that a stochastic kick to a particle's momentum is a relatively
straight-forward modification of the derivative, it is not a priori clear what
would give rise to a torsion-like contribution.
\section{Conclusion}
The work presented here answers
two questions about space-time defects raised in \cite{Hossenfelder:2013zda}: a) What is the
time-dependence of the average density of local space-time defects in an expanding
universe and b) Does the presence of this average contribution from the space-time defects affect the
expansion of the universe. The answer to question a) is that the correction
term to the derivative drops with $1/a^3$, just like the baryonic density.
The answer to question b) is that the average contribution from space-time defects
to the dynamics of the universe is relevant only at early (Planckian) times and
the effect it has at the present time is negligble relative to that of radiation.
While we have here not taken into account stochastic deviations from the average,
the time-dependence calculated in this present work provides us with the
mean value necessary to assess possible observational consequences of local
space-time defects.
\section*{Acknowledgements}
We thank the Foundational Questions Institute FQXi for support.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 2,963 |
"A significant rainstorm yesterday and overnight has resulted in at least one mudslide, debris on roads and likely some flooding in canyons. Phones and internet are also down.
More closures may be necessary as information is gathered.
Highway 190 is reduced to one lane near 20 Mule Team Rd. Many roads have rocks and debris where flood waters crossed including the road to Scotty's Castle.
Please drive with caution and never drive across a flooded road. There may not be a road under that flood!"
Änderung der Tour: statt durch's DV nach Süden zu fahren (Badwater Road closed) --> Panamint Valley und dann nach 29 Palms zum Joshua Tree NP. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 1,441 |
We can accommodate for whole range of building projects that feature new builds and can manage the entire project for you from start to finish.
We can understand that fabricating a house completely from scratch is a very difficult and demanding task, it could also be the most important decision you ever make. The experience gained by our technicians will help create the home of your dreams.
We would like to announce that all of our new builds fully comply with the Governments proposed "zero carbon" promise which is all about making sure that any CO2 emissions are minimal when it comes to new builds. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 8,689 |
Q: Sanity check finding a number $a$ such that $p(x)$ is the minimum polynomial of $a$ over $\Bbb{Q}$ This question originates from Pinter's Abstract Algebra, Chapter 27, Exercise B4.
For each of the following polynomials $p(x)$, find a number $a$ such that $p(x)$ is the minimum polynomial of $a$ over $\Bbb{Q}$:
*
*$x^2+2x-1$
*$x^4+2x^2-1$
*$x^4-10x^2+1$
Answer:
*
*$-1+\sqrt{2}$
*$\sqrt{-1+\sqrt{2}}$
*$\sqrt{5+ 2\sqrt{6}}$
Correct?
Explanation:
*
*$x^2+2x-1=0\implies x=-1\pm\sqrt{2}$
*$x^4+2x^2-1=0\implies x^2=-1\pm\sqrt{2}\implies x=\pm\sqrt{-1\pm\sqrt{2}}$
*$x^4-10x^2+1\implies x^2=5\pm2\sqrt{6}\implies x=\pm\sqrt{5\pm 2\sqrt{6}}$
| {
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} | 6,749 |
Kyros or Cyrus (; died 8 January 712) was the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from 705 to 712. He is regarded as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church and Roman Catholic Church, which had set his feast for January 7 in Roman Catholic Church and January 8 (21) in Orthodox Church. Cyrus was placed on the patriarchal throne in 705 by Emperor Justinian II, as a replacement for the deposed Patriarch Callinicus I. Soon after Justinian's decline and eventual fall in December 711, Kyros was replaced by the new Emperor Philippicus with Patriarch John VI, who shared Philippicus' Monothelite sympathies.
See also
Eastern Orthodoxy
Notes
References
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, Oxford University Press, 1991.
External links
Santiebeati:Kyros of Constantinople
Saints from Constantinople
8th-century patriarchs of Constantinople
8th-century Christian saints
Twenty Years' Anarchy | {
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} | 9,197 |
Q: Return object array matching duplicate property What is the efficient way to return array with only duplicates?
array = [
{ name: 'name1', description:'desc1', place:'place1' },
{ name: 'name1', description:'desc1', place:'place2' },
{ name: 'name3', description:'desc3', place:'place3' },
{ name: 'name4', description:'desc4', place:'place4' },
{ name: 'name4', description:'desc4', place:'place4' },
{ name: 'name5', description:'desc5', place:'place5' }
]
In this case, we are only required to check the name and description properties for duplicates.
Results should return:
duplicates = [
{ name: 'name1', description:'desc1', place:'place1' },
{ name: 'name4', description:'desc4', place:'place4' },
]
Any easy way of doing this?
A: Filter the array, and use a Set to check if the name and description already appeared, if so add to the output. If not add to Set:
const array = [{"name":"name1","description":"desc1","place":"place1"},{"name":"name1","description":"desc1","place":"place2"},{"name":"name3","description":"desc3","place":"place3"},{"name":"name4","description":"desc4","place":"place4"},{"name":"name4","description":"desc4","place":"place4"},{"name":"name5","description":"desc5","place":"place5"}]
const result = array.filter(function({ name, description }) {
const key = `${name}-${description}`
return this.has(key) || !this.add(key)
}, new Set())
console.log(result)
To show only one duplicate of each name and description group, use a Map instead, and count the number of appearances. Show only if the number is 2.
const array = [{"name":"name1","description":"desc1","place":"place1"},{"name":"name1","description":"desc1","place":"place2"},{"name":"name3","description":"desc3","place":"place3"},{"name":"name4","description":"desc4","place":"place4"},{"name":"name4","description":"desc4","place":"place4"},{"name":"name4","description":"desc4","place":"place4"},{"name":"name5","description":"desc5","place":"place5"}]
const result = array.filter(function({ name, description }) {
const key = `${name}-${description}`
const status = (this.get(key) || 0) + 1
this.set(key, status)
return status === 2
}, new Map())
console.log(result)
A solution for IE11 based on the Map solution:
const array = [{"name":"name1","description":"desc1","place":"place1"},{"name":"name1","description":"desc1","place":"place2"},{"name":"name3","description":"desc3","place":"place3"},{"name":"name4","description":"desc4","place":"place4"},{"name":"name4","description":"desc4","place":"place4"},{"name":"name4","description":"desc4","place":"place4"},{"name":"name5","description":"desc5","place":"place5"}]
const result = array.filter(function(o) {
const key = o.name + '-' + o.description
const status = (this.get(key) || 0) + 1
this.set(key, status)
return status === 2
}, new Map())
console.log(result)
A: This would would work for duplicates of 2.
let array = [
{ name: 'name1', description:'desc1', place:'place1' },
{ name: 'name1', description:'desc1', place:'place2' },
{ name: 'name3', description:'desc3', place:'place3' },
{ name: 'name4', description:'desc4', place:'place4' },
{ name: 'name4', description:'desc4', place:'place4' },
{ name: 'name5', description:'desc5', place:'place5' }
]
let duplicates = array.reverse()
.filter((el,index)=> {
let isDuplicate = index !== array.findIndex(({name,description})=> el.name === name && el.description === description);
return isDuplicate});
console.log(duplicates)
| {
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{"url":"https:\/\/socratic.org\/questions\/does-radical-halogenation-only-occur-in-alkanes","text":"# Does radical halogenation only occur in alkanes?\n\nAug 12, 2015\n\nNo, radical halogenation also occurs in alkenes.\n\n#### Explanation:\n\nBut there are differences.\n\nIf you use ${\\text{Br}}_{2}$, you get addition instead of substitution.\n\nInstead, you use NBS (N-bromosuccinimide) in ${\\text{CCl}}_{4}$.\n\nNBS is insoluble in ${\\text{CCl}}_{4}$, but the suspended solid reacts with trace amounts of $\\text{HBr}$ to produce a low concentration of bromine.\n\nhttp:\/\/chemwiki.ucdavis.edu\/@api\/deki\/files\/2087\/Slide1_(1)jpg\n(from chemwiki.ucdavis.edu)\n\nThen the bromine molecules are homolytically cleaved by light to produce the bromine radicals that initiate the reaction.\n\nThe second difference is that the substitution occurs almost exclusively at the allylic position.\n\n(from www.chemgapedia.de)\n\nAllylic bromination is the only practical method for laboratory free radical halogenation.\n\nBut allylic chlorination with low concentrations is important in industry, where the reaction is carried out at high temperature.\n\n(from www.chemgapedia.de)","date":"2022-07-04 13:09:41","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 4, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.911853015422821, \"perplexity\": 6684.013117219563}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2022-27\/segments\/1656104375714.75\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20220704111005-20220704141005-00349.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
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wwwalslib››Saturn Manuals›Automobile›SKY 2008View and Download Saturn SKY 2008 getting to know manual online. SKY 2008 Automobile pdf manual download. Also for: 2008 sky.
2008 Saturn AURA Owner Manual M. SATURN, the SATURN Emblem, and the name AURA, When you read other manuals, you might see CAUTION and NOTICE warnings in different colors or in different words. There are also warning labels on the vehicle which use the same words, CAUTION or NOTICE. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 135 |
Rainfall warnings issued for Lower Mainland as B.C. communities brace for floods
Parts of the Lower Mainland could be drenched with up to 120 millimetres of rainfall by Sunday afternoon, according to new weather warnings from Environment and Climate Change Canada.
That rainfall will be accompanied by snowmelt on the mountains that could increase the risk of flooding and potentially impact "vulnerable landscapes and infrastructure," the weather agency said early Saturday morning.
The heaviest rain is forecast to arrive Saturday night, as another front approaches B.C.'s South Coast. Environment Canada is expecting about 60 millimetres in Vancouver, 80 millimetres in the Fraser Valley and 100 millimetres or more closer to the mountains. Squamish could see as much as 120 millimetres, according to the forecast.
"Heavy downpours can cause flash floods and water pooling on roads. Localized flooding in low-lying areas is possible. Watch for possible washouts near rivers, creeks and culverts," Environment and Climate Change Canada said in a 4:23 a.m. warning.
The B.C. government announced Friday that it's proactively closing portions of several major highways Saturday over concerns about the coming storm.
The Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure said the closures will impact Highway 3 between Hope and Princeton, Highway 99 between Pemberton and Lillooet, and Highway 1 in the Fraser Canyon.
The ministry did not initially confirm when the highways would be closed. On Saturday, it announced that Highways 1 and 3 would close at 2 p.m. and Highway 99 would close at 4 p.m.
Transportation Minister Rob Fleming urged British Columbians to avoid non-essential travel, noting an "increased risk of landslides" this weekend.
Last week's historic storm is estimated to have damaged or destroyed about 200 different points along the province's highways.
Communities that suffered severe flooding during that weather event have been bracing for this weekend's rainfall for days. Abbotsford Mayor Henry Braun, whose city is already estimated to have sustained $1 billlion in damage, said officials "remain very concerned" despite the work that's been completed to keep its Barrowtown Pump Station operational.
The main portion of a dike that burst last week, sending water from the Sumas River gushing into Sumas Prairie, has been repaired, and crews are working to raise a further seven kilometres of dike along the river.
DEVELOPING | Someone died of COVID-19 every 3 hours over the weekend in B.C.
Driver crashes SUV into fast food restaurant in Surrey
Six people were taken into police custody after gunshots were reported in a Nanaimo neighbourhood on Monday.
The city's animal protection organization says it will soon stop investigating cases of alleged animal abuse or neglect.
The nation's weather agency has issued a freezing rain warning for Saskatoon.
As ice begins to form on area lakes and waterways, many anglers and outdoor enthusiasts are venturing out to have a good time or catch the big one.
A strong area of low pressure tracked southeast of Lake Ontario Monday and brought very heavy snow across parts of southern Ontario. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 2,407 |
Q: Why is CORS working? I expected it to fail I want to understand how CORS is working in this case without any server side configuration on my part (full network timeline screenshot below)
I'm working on a web app that started out as a Chrome extension prototype. It has a chrome manifest like this
{
"name": "How to lose clients and annoy coworkers",
"description": "Useful tips for more unproductive living",
"version": "0.2",
"chrome_url_overrides": {
"newtab": "index.html"
},
"options_ui": {
"page": "options.html",
"chrome_style": true
},
"icons": {
"16": "images/all-skin-types-16x16.png",
"48": "images/all-skin-types-48x48.png",
"128": "images/all-skin-types-128x128.png"
},
"manifest_version": 2,
"permissions": [
"storage",
"tabs",
"https://sheetsu.com/apis/2e55358e/*"
]
}
I then decided to make it into a web based app expecting to have to solve the issue of making requests to https://sheetsu.com/apis/2e55358e/* which is a Google Spreadsheet backend. But it works without any changes in Chrome and Firefox. I tried to make another request to Twitter and that failed.
I thought maybe it was because of the [Chrome extension manifest.json][3] but when I added https://twitter.com to the permissions list, it still failed.
And I was also able to make a POST request to https://sheetsu.com/apis/2e55358e
A: Access-Control-Allow-Origin @ https://sheetsu.com/apis/2e55358e has your domain listed (iampeterbanjo.github.io) but twitter.com does not.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 1,660 |
Patriots beat Colts 24-20 in battle of unbeatens
No running up the score this week. Against the Colts, the New England Patriots had to struggle just to survive.
INDIANAPOLIS -- No running up the score this week. Against the Colts, the New England Patriots had to struggle just to survive.
Survive they did, staying on course for an unbeaten season as Tom Brady threw two of his three touchdown passes in a four-minute span of the fourth quarter to overcome a 10-point deficit and beat Super Bowl champion Indianapolis, 24-20, Sunday.
The win, in perhaps the NFL's biggest regular-season game ever, keeps the Patriots (9-0) on course for the NFL's first unbeaten season since Miami did it in 1972 and gives them the first tiebreaker over Indianapolis (7-1) in the AFC playoffs.
"We were going against a hostile crowd, an undefeated team, we took our hats off to them. But we still played well enough to win," New England linebacker Junior Seau said.
New England, which had been scoring more than 41 points a game and had beaten eight opponents by an average of more than 25, had piled points on late in several games in which they were far ahead, including last week's 52-7 win over Washington.
In this contest, anticipated since the schedule came out last April, they had to work their hardest just to win.
They trailed 20-10 after Peyton Manning scored on a 1-yard sneak with 9 minutes and 42 seconds left in the game, and the crowd roaring.
But on a second-and-10 from their own 42, Brady hit Randy Moss over the top for 55 yards to the Colts 3 on a play in which Indy lost Bob Sanders, its best defensive back. That set up a 3-yard TD pass to Wes Welker.
Rosevelt Colvin knocked the ball loose from Manning to force a punt on the next series. Then Brady found Kevin Faulk over the middle for 13 yards for the winning score with 3:15 left.
Jarvis Green knocked the ball lose from Manning and Colvin recovered to clinch the game on the Colts' next series.
"Some victories do mean more than others," said linebacker Tedy Bruschi, one of a handful of Patriots who played on all three of their Super Bowl winners. "This is one we're going to remember."
For three quarters this looked like Indy's game.
It seemed to have turned with 13 seconds left in the first half, when Joseph Addai took a short pass from Manning and raced 73 yards for a touchdown, at least twice faking out New England defenders who seemed as if they expected him to run out of bounds to stop the clock. That gave the Colts a 13-7 halftime lead and seemed to be a huge momentum shift.
It certainly energized a Colts defense that was flying all over the field at the start of the second half. Dwight Freeney and Robert Mathis kept Brady under pressure most of the afternoon and when middle linebacker Gary Brackett picked off a Brady pass in the first minute of the fourth quarter that led to Manning's sneak, Indy seemed in control.
But Brady, who had 30 touchdown passes in the first half of the season, putting him on course to shatter Manning's three-year-old record of 49, finally awoke late. The long pass to Moss was New England's first gain longer than 19 yards. It came on a scramble by Brady, who extended his record with at least 3 TD passes a game to start the season to nine games.
Moss proved to be a key throughout, finishing with 9 catches for 145 yards and a touchdown.
Coach Tony Dungy said the Colts had prepared for Moss, knowing the Patriots would go to him when they needed a big play. Yet, they were unable to contain him when it counted most.
"We didn't have the answer for Randy Moss today," Dungy said. "We had a lot of attention paid to him trying to stop him from catching the deep balls but he caught the deep one at the big time of the game. That was really the play of the game, got them a quick score."
The Colts played without Marvin Harrison, their top receiver, who missed his third straight game with a knee injury. Starting left tackled Tony Ugoh also was out and the Colts lost Tony Gonzalez, Harrison's replacement, with a finger injury in the first half.
In the end, that wasn't as much a factor as Brady. He threw for 153 of his 255 yards in the fourth quarter as the Patriots broke a three-game losing streak against the Colts, who beat them here 38-34 in the AFC title game last season and went on to win the Super Bowl by beating Chicago.
This game was supposed to be more like that AFC title game than the defensive struggle it was until Brady finally Brady finally made his big plays. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 8,689 |
\section{Introduction}
Focusing \cite{focusing1,focusing2,focusing3,focusing4,focusing5,focusing6,focusing7}, collimation \cite{collimation1,collimation2,collimation3,collimation4}, sub-wavelength resolution \cite{sub1,sub2,sub3,sub4}, and negative refraction \cite{Pendry} have been among the most fascinating properties observed in either electromagnetic or acoustic metamaterials. Within the range of validity of the long wavelength approximation, these artificial media are often modeled using effective parameters obtained via a homogenization approach\cite{EM1,EM2}. Several studies\cite{NP1,NP2,Liu} have also shown that the effective material properties can be made either zero or negative by exploiting the effect of local resonances.
In the acoustic field, the use of metamaterials for practical applications has been severely limited by their fabrication complexity. To-date, the majority of the locally-resonant designs exploits a multi-material approach that relies on metal inclusions embedded inside a polymeric host that serves as coupling with the main material. This design approach is affected by fabrication issues (particularly those due to interfacing highly dissimilar materials) and does not yield structural (i.e. load-bearing) materials.
Recently, Zhu et al. \cite{Zhu3} have introduced a new class of two-dimensional single-material systems able to achieve high level dispersion and propagation properties comparable with those of traditional multi-material designs \cite{Liu} while also combining features proper of both non-resonant and locally-resonant systems\cite{cui}. Zhu's design focused on a thin two dimensional waveguide tailored via an embedded lattice of geometric tapers characterized by a power-law thickness variation; an element known as the Acoustic Black Hole (ABH) (Fig. \ref{Fig1}a). Among the distinctive features of the ABH, we highlight the progressive and smooth reduction of the phase velocity as flexural waves approach its center. Zhu's design exploits geometric inhomogeneities, fabricated in an initially homogeneous and isotropic thin plate, to tailor the dynamic properties of the host structure. This approach drastically reduces the fabrication complexity while increasing the scalability of the design because the inhomogeneities can be easily obtained by machining prescribed taper profiles. We merely observe that this procedure could virtually transform any material into a metamaterial exhibiting carefully controlled wave propagation properties. It is worth noting that the tapered design does not alter the structural character of the original component which maintains its load-bearing capabilities. This characteristic is in net contrast with multi-material designs in which the interfaces between dissimilar materials (typically metals and polymers) drastically affect fabrication complexity, structural performance, and durability.
While previous work [\onlinecite{Zhu3}] concentrated on the analysis and understanding of the dispersion properties in connection with the specific ABH lattice structure and its design parameters, this study investigates the potential of the ABH-based design to synthesize devices able to manipulate acousto-elastic waves in structural waveguides. In particular, this paper explores the use of tapered units to design and implement different types of acoustic lenses fully embedded in structural waveguides and able to achieve unconventional propagation effects such as focusing, collimation, and bi-refraction.
Acoustic engineered materials are typically designed for specific (wavelength) operating ranges which are governed by different propagation mechanisms. Metamaterials are designed for the long wavelength limit and are governed by effective material properties obtained according to homogenization principles. Phononic materials are designed for the short wavelength limit and are governed by scattering mechanisms. The two designs drastically under perform when used outside their respective operating range. It is anticipated that the ABH-based design exploits the same operating principle in both the long and the short wavelength limits, therefore providing a design approach with an intrinsic potential for broadband performance.
As previously mentioned, the unit cell at the basis of the metamaterial design exploits a type of tapered profile known as the \textit{Acoustic Black Hole} \cite{Krylov1,Krylov2}. The ABH is a structural feature, typically embedded in plate-like components, often used for the control of vibration \cite{krylovadd,krylovadd1,krylovadd2,Zhao,Colon1,Colon2} and sound radiated by structural elements\cite{Colon,Colon3}. The ABH is obtained by embedding a power-law taper having a thickness profile of the form $h(x)=\varepsilon x^m$.
The ABH determines a spatially dependent distribution of the phase and group velocity. In a one-dimensional power-law taper, the phase $c_p$ and group velocity $c_g$\cite{Mironov} are:
\begin{subequations}
\begin{gather}
c_p(x)=\sqrt[4]{\frac{D}{\rho h^3}}\sqrt{\omega \cdot \varepsilon x^m} \label{velocityp} \\
c_g(x)=\sqrt[4]{\frac{16D}{\rho h^3}}\sqrt{\omega \cdot \varepsilon x^m} \label{velocityg}
\end{gather}
\end{subequations}
where $D(x)$ is the plate bending stiffness. The wavenumber becomes a function of the position along the taper:
\begin{equation}
k(x)=\sqrt[4]{12} \sqrt{\frac{k_{l}}{\varepsilon x_{m}}} \label{localk}
\end{equation}
where $k_{l}$ is the longitudinal wavenumber in a thin plate of constant thickness $h_0=h(x_0)$, with $x_0$ being an arbitrary position for the calculation of the local thickness.
Extending these concepts to an axis-symmetric geometry, the wavevector becomes a spatial function $k(r,\theta)$, where $r$ and $\theta$ are in-plane cylindrical coordinates. The trajectory of an acoustic wave traveling through the ABH would be bent in the direction of the negative phase velocity gradient, i.e. $\pdone{c_p}{r} \leq 0$, which coincides with any radial path in the inward direction (that is the direction of the decreasing radius). When the smoothness condition\cite{Mironov} $\{ m$, $\varepsilon \}$ $\in \mathbb{R}$, $m \geq 2$, and $\varepsilon \ll (3 \rho \omega^2 / E)^{1/2}$ is satisfied, reflections are minimized and the wave is eventually trapped inside the ABH. Note that this condition would be achieved only in presence of an ideal ABH profile for which the thickness decreases to zero at the center of the taper. In real structures, the residual thickness at the ABH center $h(r)=\epsilon r^m+h_r$ is non-zero as shown in Fig.\ref{Fig1}a. This condition results in selected frequencies (those associated with the higher phase velocities) being able to cross entirely the tapered area although with a curved trajectory.
In the following study, we present the application of two-dimensional ABH periodic lattices to the design of acoustic lenses fully embedded into structural waveguides. Unconventional propagation effects including focusing, collimation, and bi-refraction were numerically investigated for both the long and the short wavelength operating range. A subset of these lenses was also fabricated and experimentally validated.
\section{Embedded ABH acoustic lens: numerical model}
For the present study, we embedded a finite-size slab of a squared periodic lattice in an otherwise flat plate. The corresponding numerical model is shown in Fig.\ref{Fig1}a. The waveguide thickness was $h_0=8 mm$ while the ABH taper was defined by the coefficients $m=2.2$ and $h_r=1.1 mm $. The radius of the ABH was $r_0=50 mm$ while the lattice constant was $a=140 mm$. The waveguide can be conceptually divided in three parts one of which is the periodic slab while the remaining two are the constant-thickness layers before and after the slab (Fig. \ref{Fig1}a). The ABH slab represents the acoustic lens while the homogeneous layers are used to generate and receive the incident and the transmitted wave. The numerical model was solved by finite element analysis using the commercial software COMSOL Multiphysics. Perfectly Matched Layers (PML) were used on the surrounding boundaries to minimize the effect of reflections. A frequency analysis was performed to extract the propagation behavior.
Note that the dispersion properties of a thin plate with an embedded periodic lattice of ABHs were studied in depth in \cite{Zhu3} and they will only be briefly summarized in the following section in order to facilitate the interpretation of the numerical and experimental results.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\center{\includegraphics[scale=0.42]{Fig1.eps}}
\caption{(a) Schematic of the waveguide with embedded periodic arrays of Acoustic Black Holes and (b) cross-section of an ABH. (c) Band structure of the studied acoustic metamaterials made of periodic geometric tapers for the frequency range up to $\Omega$=0.25.} \label{Fig1}
\end{figure}
\section{LONG WAVELENGTH LIMIT: BAND STRUCTURE AND PROPAGATION ANALYSIS}
In this section we investigate, both numerically and experimentally, the performance of the ABH-based embedded acoustic lens in the long wavelength limit, that is when the wavelength of the flexural wave in the flat structure is, at least, twice the size of the unit cell. This is often referred to as the \textit{metamaterial range}. In this range, the fundamental propagation characteristics of the unit cell can be well described by the band structure and the Equi-Frequency-Contours (EFC) \cite{Zhu3}. We highlight that among the most noticeable properties of the ABH plates mode hybridization, bi-refraction, and Dirac-like cones were observed.
The dispersion curves of the ABH waveguide are shown in Fig.\ref{Fig1}c in terms of the normalized frequency. We focus on the first folded $A_0$ mode (marked green in Fig.\ref{Fig1}c), because this is the fundamental flexural mode which is largely excited in structural waveguides and also because of a peculiar hybridization effect associated with positive-negative group velocity. The equi-frequency-contours of this mode are presented in Fig.\ref{Fig2}a. A quick inspection of the EFCs reveals that a large number of different propagation behaviors should be expected in this lattice. Moving from the $\Gamma$ point towards increasing wavenumbers, say along the $\Gamma - M$ direction, we observe circular, square, concave, and convex EFC, respectively. While the circular profile concerns an isotropic propagation typical of very long wavelengths, the square and concave EFCs suggest collimation and focusing effects, respectively. The convex EFCs were shown numerically \cite{Zhu3} to correspond to bi-refraction behavior.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\center{\includegraphics[scale=0.45]{Fig2.eps}}
\caption{(a) The equi-frequency-contours of the hybrid $S_0-A_{0f}$. The superimposed schematics shows the Brillouin zone (black line) and the $k-$conservation analysis that allows identifying the direction of the refracted wave. (b) The out-of-plane displacement field in the presence of the acoustic lens showing the strong collimation effect. (c) The out-of-plane displacement field generated by an excitation at $f_0=2.2$ kHz in the absence of the acoustic lens showing the expected diverging ultrasonic beam.} \label{Fig2}
\end{figure}
For the numerical analysis of the bi-refraction effect the reader is remanded to [\onlinecite{Zhu3}]. Here below we report the numerical results for the self-collimation case. In this analysis, we considered the aluminum plate with an embedded $15\times12$ ABH square lattice in the center region. The interface of the flat area with the ABH slab was aligned along the $\Gamma-X(X')$ boundary. An $A_0$ plane wave at $f_0=2.2$ kHz (approximately $\Omega=0.0987$ corresponding to a square-like EFC) was used as excitation. The full field out-of-plane displacement is shown in Fig.\ref{Fig2}b which clearly confirms the occurrence of strong self-collimation. For clarity, we also report the corresponding wave filed in in the absence of the ABH lens (Fig.\ref{Fig2}c) which, as expected, results in a diverging beam. In more quantitative terms, without the acoustic lens the angle of aperture of the beam is approximately $\theta=37.4^{\circ}$ while in prresence of the lens the angle is approximately $\theta=0^{\circ}$.
\subsection{Experimental validation: long wavelength limit}
In order to validate the ABH-based design of the acoustic lens, we fabricated two different samples. Each sample was built embedding a different design of the acoustic lens. The two samples were design to validate the self-collimation and the bi-refraction effects. The waveguides were scaled down to a thickness of $0.16$ in ($\approx 4mm$) so to bring the frequency of the $A_0$ mode to a range convenient for excitation and measurement. The parameters of the lattice structure were modified accordingly resulting in $a = 30$ mm, radius $r = 14$ mm, taper exponent $m = 2.2$, and residual thickness $h_r = 1$ mm. These updated geometric parameters shifted the operating frequency range to $10-20$ kHz.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\center{\includegraphics[scale=0.4]{Fig3.eps}}
\caption{Experimental setup. (a) and (b) shows the front view of the two plate samples having an embedded lens in the center section. The lenses were made out of the same ABH unit cell arranged in a square lattice structure but oriented along different directions of the Brillouin zone. In (a) the interface was aligned along the $\Gamma-X$ direction while in (b) along the $\Gamma-M$ direction. (c) The test samples were mounted in a vertical frame to facilitate the laser measurements. Viscoelastic tape was applied along the plate's edges to reduce back-scattering and reverberation. (d) The zoom-in view of the surface mounted MFC transducers that were generating the excitation.} \label{Fig3}
\end{figure}
The experimental setup is shown in Fig.\ref{Fig3}. Figure \ref{Fig3}a and b show the front view of the two plate samples with the embedded ABH lattice. The ABH unit cell is identical in each configuration while the arrangement of the square lattice follows different directions. In Fig.\ref{Fig3}a, the interface is aligned with the $\Gamma-X$ direction while in Fig.\ref{Fig3}b it is aligned with the $\Gamma-M$ direction. During the experimental measurements, the plates were mounted in a vertical frame providing clamped boundary conditions on the left and right edges (Fig.\ref{Fig3}c). The response of the plate was acquired using a scanning laser vibrometer which measured the out-of-plane displacement field of the entire plate. An array of four Micro Fiber Composite (MFC) patches was surface bonded and used to generate the excitation. For the bi-refraction test, the MFC array was oriented at $15^{\circ}$ as shown in the zoom-in view in Fig.\ref{Fig3}d) while for the collimation test the it was aligned parallel to the interface. The MFC patches were simultaneously actuated to generate the desired $A_0$ planar wave fronts. Viscous damping tapes were applied along the edges to reduce the effect of back-scattering and reverberation.
The experimental results are shown in Fig.\ref{Fig4}(a),(c) and compared with the corresponding numerical simulations (Fig.\ref{Fig4}(b),(d)). The top row shows the results for collimation while the bottom row shows the bi-refraction. The area marked by the white box indicates the location of the ABH periodic lattice. Overall, there is an excellent qualitative agreement between the predicted propagation behavior and the experimental measurements. The collimation case (operating frequency $f_1=$ 20.2 kHz) shows an approximately zero angle of divergence as well as a strong persistence of the beam shape after the lens. For the bi-refraction case (operating frequency $f_2=13.6$ kHz), the incident beam is split into two beams within the lattice which give rise to a positively (red arrow) and a negatively (blue arrow) refracted beams after the lens.
Both the beams are oriented at about $5^{\circ}$ with respect to the interface, which is also in agreement with the numerical calculations.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\center{\includegraphics[scale=0.42]{Fig4.eps}}
\caption{Experimental results. (a) and (b) show the experimental and numerical results for the collimation design obtained at $f_1$=20.2 kHz. (c) and (d) show the experimental and numerical results for the bi-refraction case at $f_2$=13.6 kHz. In both cases, good agreement between the numerical predictions and the experimental results was observed. } \label{Fig4}
\end{figure}
\section{High Frequency Behavior: geometric acoustic analysis}
In this section, we analyze the performance of the lens in the high frequency range that is where the wavelength of the flexural wave is smaller than the size of the unit. In general, the response of a periodic material that operates in this range (the so-called phononic range) is dominated by scattering effects. In the case of the ABH material (as far as the smoothness condition is satisfied), flexural waves would still propagate through the lattice according to a mechanism similar to that observed in the long wavelength limit. This means that the scattering is minimized and the wave direction is gradually bent due to the spatial gradient in the phase velocity. When the wavelength is such that the smoothness condition is no longer satisfied than the response of the ABH material would be purely dominated by scattering effects, that is the classical phononic range. This suggest that, for an ABH lattice, the occurrence of the phonic range is not dominated by the size of the unit cell but instead from the smoothness condition.
To study the wave propagation through the ABH material in the high frequency range, we use both a geometric acoustic and a full field simulation approach. Geometric acoustics was chosen because it allows a good qualitative understanding of the wave behavior inside the lens due to its ability to track the ray trajectories through local inhomogeneities.
The trajectory of a ray for uncoupled elastic waves is given by\cite{ray}:
\begin{subequations}
\begin{gather}
\frac{d\vec{x}}{dt}=c^2\vec{s} \label{ray1} \\
\frac{d\vec{s}}{dt}=-\frac{1}{c}\nabla c \label{ray2}
\end{gather}
\end{subequations}
where $\vec{x}$ is the position vector along the ray trajectory, $\vec{s}$ is the wave slowness vector that can be expressed as $\vec{s}=\frac{\vec{n}}{c}$ being $c$ the local phase velocity and $\vec{n}$ the unit vector normal of the wavefront. Equations \ref{ray1}-\ref{ray2} can be numerically integrated to obtain the ray trajectories across the inhomogeneous medium. For the ABH, the spatial distribution of the phase velocity is given by $\frac{c}{c_0}=\sqrt{\frac{h(r)}{h_0)}}=\sqrt{\frac{\varepsilon r^m+h_r}{h_0}}$, where $c_0$ is the phase velocity in the background material.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\center{\includegraphics[scale=0.43]{Fig5.eps}}
\caption{Different acoustic lens effects can be achieved via periodic ABH tapers also in the short wavelength limit: including (a) collimation (b) focusing and (c) bi-refraction. The left panels show the geometric acoustic simulations while the right panels show the full wave field obtained from finite element simulations. In (a) and (b), a point source excitation at frequency $f=43$ kHz located at different distance from the lens leads to either collimation or focusing. In (c), a plane source at $f=103$ kHz and tilted at $48^{\circ}$ produces a bi-refraction effect. } \label{Fig5}
\end{figure}
The local geometric inhomogeneity of an ABH taper produces a spatial gradient in the phase velocity which bends propagating waves towards the regions with lower wave speed (i.e. the ABH center in this specific case). Generally, the larger the gradient the smaller the radius of curvature. To analyze the lens performance in the high frequency limit, we considered a flat plate with an embedded slab of ABH tapers. The slab consisted of a $3\times6$ periodic square lattice with constant $a_1=0.05$ m (Fig.\ref{Fig1}a). The ABHs had residual thickness $h_r=1.72$ mm, taper coefficient $m=2.2$, and the radius $r=24$ mm.
Following the analyses in the long wavelength domain, we investigated the response of the plate with respect to collimation, and bi-refraction. For completeness, we also added the case of high frequency focusing. The results are summarized in Fig.\ref{Fig5} (a), (b) and (c). The left panels show the ray acoustic results while the right panels show the full field finite element simulations.
Fig.\ref{Fig5}a illustrates the collimation effects where the ABH slab is excited by a point source (see red star) at a distance $L=0.085$ m from the ABH. Aside from some lateral scattering resulting from rays at large angle of incidence, most of the rays are effectively bent and molded into a collimated beam after the lens. The ray acoustics simulations clearly show the operating mechanism within the lens and confirm that, also in the high frequency regime, the ABHs induce a progressive bending of the rays instead of an abrupt change in the propagation direction typical of traditional high-frequency scattering and refraction. The full wave simulation analysis at $f_0$=43 kHz (Fig.\ref{Fig5}a, right panel), that is corresponding to a wavelength of $\lambda =0.598a_1$ also shows the formation of a collimated beam that is fully consistent with the ray acoustic predictions. For completeness, we show also the high-frequency focusing effect from the same point source that can be achieved at the same frequency by adjusting the position of the source ($L=0.13$ m) with respect to the lens (Fig.\ref{Fig5}b). Both ray acoustics and full field results are fully consistent with each other and show that the focusing effective is still due to a progressive bending of the rays.
Finally, figures \ref{Fig5}c show the predictions for the high-frequency bi-refraction case. A planar wave front at an angle of $48^{\circ}$ was used to illuminate the lens. In the geometric acoustics analysis, the source was simulated as a beam of initially parallel rays. The simulations show that the original beam is separated into two beams that are progressively bent in diverging directions, therefore giving rise to positive and negative refraction. Once again, these results show that the operating mechanism is unchanged with respect to the long wavelength regime. We merely note that, similarly to what found for the metamaterial range, the bi-refraction effect will occur only above a given value of the incident angle. This suggests the existence of a critical angle analogously to classical refraction phenomena. This propagation mechanism was further confirmed by full field analysis whose results are shown in Fig. \ref{Fig5}c at $f_0=103$ kHz,that is corresponding to a wavelength of $\lambda =0.3267a_1$ .
A simplified experimental study was performed to validate the above analyses. The experimental setup retained for the test was the same used for the long wavelength limit experimental validation. We chose to maintain the same experimental setup in order to show the ability of the same lens to operate in the two regimes. Nevertheless, note that to achieve optimal performance across different operating regimes the lens would still require some tuning. As an example, in the short wavelength limit this tuning would lead towards a lower number of ABH rows, which is consistent with the design approach followed in the numerical simulations. Both the collimation and bi-refraction cases were explored (Fig. \ref{Fig6}). The actuation in these two cases was performed using: 1) a single MFC acting as a quasi-point-source, and 2) an array of two MFCs at an oblique incidence of approximately $12^{\circ}$ (Fig.\ref{Fig6}b). The white box in Fig. \ref{Fig6}a indicates the area after the ABH lattice where measurements were performed. The lattice was excited harmonically at a frequency $f=50$ kHz (corresponding to a wavelength of $\lambda =0.8167a$) and the response was measured using a scanning laser vibrometer. The experimental results are shown in Fig. \ref{Fig6}c and d which correspond to the point source and to the oblique incidence excitation, respectively. We must highlight that the frequency of excitation was right on the bandwidth limit of the transducer amplifier which limited considerably the maximum obtainable signal-to-noise ratio. Despite this hardware limitation, in both cases results were sufficiently clear to show the occurrence of both collimation and bi-refraction, as predicted. In Fig. \ref{Fig6}d a second positively refracted beam (marked by the white arrow), is also visible due to the large width of the lens as well as refractions from the boundaries. As mentioned above, for optimal results the lens parameters should be adjusted.
We believe that these results supports our initial statement that the ABH-based design enables the synthesis of acoustic metamaterials characterized by a broad operating range. This result is possible because both regimes exploit, within the limit of the smoothness condition, the same fundamental operating principle that is a progressive bending of the acoustic ray due to a phase velocity gradient. This characteristic is in net contrast with the more traditional designs of engineered materials that are typically targeted to either the metamaterial or the phononic range.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\center{\includegraphics[scale=0.44]{Fig6.eps}}
\caption{(a) Front view of the test bed. The white box indicates the area where measurements are performed. (b) Zoomed-in view shows the MFC array tilted at an angle of $12^{\circ}$ with respect to the ABH lattice. (c) and (d) show the experimentally measured displacement fields for the case of collimation and bi-refraction, respectively.} \label{Fig6}
\end{figure}
\section{Conclusion}
We investigated the use of geometric inhomogeneities in order to create broadband acoustic lenses that can be fully embedded in thin-walled structural waveguides without altering their basic structural characteristics. The study was also targeted to demonstrate that these materials operate in the two wavelength regimes according to the same mechanism, that is a progressive bending of the wave trajectory due to a spatially tailored wave speed profile. In fact, it is this mechanism that allows such materials to achieve broadband performance over both the metamaterial and the phononic range (within the the validity limit of the smoothness assumption). The specific type of inhomogeneity used in this study, known as the Acoustic Black Hole (ABH), consists in a geometric taper that follows a power-law profile. Numerical simulations performed via both geometric acoustics and finite element analysis have shown the ability of these materials to achieve collimation, bi-refraction, and focusing in both the long and short wavelength limits. An experimental investigation was performed to validate the design approach and the performance in both wavelength regimes. The experimental results were in very good qualitative agreement with the numerical predictions therefore confirming the validity of the models used to understand the fundamental operating principles of ABH materials.
\section{Acknowledgments}
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under the YIP grant \#FA9550-15-1-0133.
\bibliographystyle{apsrev}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 5,332 |
Q: Joomla 1.5 and Wincache I make the integration of Wincache with Joomla 1.5, but i see often, in php_errors this:
PHP Warning: Creating default object from empty value in joomla.php on line 136
The code is this:
$session =& JFactory::getSession();
$session->set('user', $instance);
$storage = $session->_store;
$session_data = $storage->readSessionData($session->getId());
/*136*/ $session_data->guest = $instance->get('guest');
$session_data->username = $instance->get('username');
I think that I need to declare the object but i don't know how...
Thanks!
A: these are warnings.
If they do not affect your site usability, you may turn them of using the backend.
Go to Global Configuration.
In the server tab (If I remember well) there is something like Error Reporting.
Turn it off by setting it to none.
A: Joomla 1.5 is past end of life and does not really work perfectly in current version of PHP (since it was written to support 4.4.7 an... so a lot of things that didn't used to generate warnings are going to generate warnings if you have modern PHP and it sometimes can really not be worth the effort. Does $instance actually exist?
A: Problem solved!
$session_data was empty in some circoustance so this generate the problem:
$session_data = $storage->readSessionData($session->getId());
For solve it, simple add:
if (! $storage->readSessionData($session->getId()) ){$session_data = new stdClass();}
Thanks to all!
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 3,777 |
Q: Querying a Model Using an Array in Rails I have two models, Question and Answer.
class Answer < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :question
end
class Question < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :answers
end
In my controller action, what I want to do is to determine all of the questions that a user has answered. I have a query that finds all of the answers for a user:
@answers = current_user.answers
Now, I want to find out what Questions those relate to. I tried
@questions = Question.where("id in ?", @answers)
but it doesn't work. I get this error:
Mysql2::Error: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '4,5,6)' at line 1: SELECT `questions`.* FROM `questions` WHERE (id in 4,5,6)
When I try this:
@questions = Question.where("id in ?", @answers.question_id)
I get this error (question_id is a field in Answer):
undefined method `question_id' for [4, 5, 6]:Array
How can I best query Questions based on Answers a User has?
A: Question.where(id: @answers.map(&:question_id))
A: You can approach the problem from a different angle. You could have a custom scope in your Question model:
scope :by_answerer, -> (user_id) { includes(:answers).where(answers: {user_id: user_id}) }
Then in your User model:
def answered_questions
Question.by_answerer(id)
end
A: The clue is in the SQL that is generated (in the error message)
SELECT `questions`.* FROM `questions` WHERE (id in 4,5,6)
that's not valid syntax. You want
SELECT `questions`.* FROM `questions` WHERE (id in (4,5,6))
so you're looking for
@questions = Question.where("id in (?)", @answers)
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 7,204 |
Pavitra Papi (Punjabi: ਪਵਿੱਤਰ ਪਾਪੀ; English:"The Holy Sinner") is a 1970 Indian Hindi-language drama film directed by Rajendra Bhatia. The film stars Balraj Sahni, Parikshit Sahni and Tanuja. The movie was based on a Punjabi novel by famous writer Nanak Singh.
Plot
It is small-town India of the 19th century. Pannalal is employed in a clock repair shop owned by Lala Attarchand. He is replaced by Kedarnath, who has some old family bonds with Lala Attarchand, and who has come to town from his village in search of exactly this work, because his ancestors were in the same business (clock-making). Upon losing his job, Pannalal curses Kedarnath as being the cause of his family becoming destitute. He writes a letter to Kadarnath saying that "your actions have driven me to death because I cannot support my family or get my daughters married." Pannalal then disappears from the scene, after telling his wife that he is going to a far-off city in order to meet an old friend and raise money.
Kedarnath, who has received the suicide note, is convinced that Pannalal has committed suicide after telling his wife a comforting story. He is consumed by guilt. He goes out of his way to help Pannalal's wife Maya and their two daughters, Veena and Vidya. He rents a room in their house, writes letters to Maya which are delivered to her as if they have come from Pannalal, and these letters also contain money. As a helpful tenant, he does a lot of work around the house, and also helps Veena with her school-work. He falls in love with her, but her feelings are not properly known. Maya tells Kedarnath of one big concern in her life: Veena's marriage was already arranged by Pannalal, and now the boy's family are trying to wiggle out of the engagement, perhaps because the Pannalal family is now quite poor. The boy's parents are saying that they can no longer wait for Pannalal to return with funds, their boy is growing older by the day, and they will now look elsewhere. Kedarnath hides his feelings for Veena and helps in expediting in her marriage with the son of Daulatram. When Maya tells him that she does not have enough money to pay for the marriage expenses, he steals cash from his employer, and tells Maya that the money has come from Pannalal. He then goes away from the village.
Veena's in-laws turn out to be rogues, except for her father-in-law, who counsels his family that they should not torture their daughter-in-law this way. Meanwhile, Pannalal, who is in fact alive, returns to his family. Hearing that his daughter is already married to the person with whom he had arranged the marriage, he proceeds to Veena's marital home to visit her. Here, he finds that his daughter is living in a miserable condition. He brings her back to his own house.
Kedar, who now lives in Delhi, regularly sends money orders to repay his debt to Lala Attarchand. Pannalal finds out Kedar's whereabouts and requests him to come back and save a dying Veena. But Kedar instead makes Veena's husband realize his mistakes and unites the pair without appearing in person. The film ends with Kedarnath going away.
Cast
Balraj Sahni ... Pannalal
Parikshat Sahni ... Kedarnath
Tanuja ... Veena
Neetu Singh ... Vidya (as Baby Sonia)
Achala Sachdev ... Maya
Abhi Bhattacharya ... Writer (Man who helped Kedarnath)
I. S. Johar ... Lala Attarchand
Manorama ... Mrs. Lala Attarchand
Gulshan Bawra ... Adarshan's worker
Upendra Trivedi
Jugnu
Jayshree T. ... Dancer in white dress (in song "Sada Sadak Dil") (as Jaishree)
Madhumati... as dancer in the song "Lede saiyaan ordnee"
Music
Prem Dhawan has composed both the lyrics and music for this movie. "Teri Duniya Se" is sung by Kishore Kumar. This song was played across radio and television channels when Kishore died on 13 October 1987. Another song by Rafi Sahab, "Allah Hi Allah Kar Pyare", was filmed at a very famous place called Rani Talab (queen's bathing pond) in the historic town Jind, a district city of Haryana.
References
External links
1970 films
1970s Hindi-language films
Hindi-language drama films
Films scored by Prem Dhawan
Indian drama films
1970 drama films
Films based on Indian novels | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 5,384 |
This repository is a collection of small self-contained code examples that
demonstrate various design patterns, principles, package features, or
mathematical methods.
When working through ways to do something in code, I often find myself testing
the functionality I need using small self-contained examples before trying to
apply new techniques to larger problems. These simple examples usally also serve
as a reference for various tricks I've learned after extensive trial and error.
I'm uploading some of my examples here so that I can more easily share them in
discussions with other developers and so that they can benefit others who happen
to be trying to do some of the same things.
The examples here are not bug-free and are not set up to work across all
platforms or configurations. As a general rule, however, each example is small
enough that it should be easy for someone familiar with their development
environment to adapt them so that they will work in the needed contexts.
Regardless of what the example is intended to do, don't expect it to work
properly or even at all. This is a stash of ideas and examples, not a collection
of cros-platform machine-independent idioms. Some things may not work at all.
Outside contributions are still welcome to fix bugs or add examples that serve a
purpose similar to the others already present here.
All code here is licensed under a 2 clause BSD license. See license.txt for
further details.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 4,087 |
import { Port } from "./ir1/ports/port";
import * as Types from "./ir1/types";
import * as Values from "./ir1/values";
const maxLength = 10;
function printValue(value: Values.ReadyValue, print: (s: string) => void) {
if (value instanceof Values.Integer || value instanceof Values.Float ||
value instanceof Values.Boolean || value instanceof Values.ErrorValue) {
print(String(value.value));
return;
}
if (value instanceof Values.StreamElement) {
printValue(value.value, print);
return;
}
if (value instanceof Values.Function) {
print("{function_body}");
return;
}
if (value instanceof Values.Array || value instanceof Values.CompleteStream) {
trimmedPrint(value.values, print);
return;
}
if (value instanceof Values.Record) {
const values: Values.ReadyValue[] = [];
value.values.forEach((v: Values.ReadyValue, key: string) => {
values.push(v);
});
trimmedPrint(values, print);
return;
}
}
function trimmedPrint(values: Values.ReadyValue[], print: (s: string) => void) {
let count = 0;
print("{");
for (const value of values) {
if (count > 0) {
print(", ");
}
printValue(value, print);
count++;
if (count >= maxLength) {
print(", ...");
break;
}
}
print("}");
}
export function printPortData(input: Port, print: (s: string) => void) {
const value = input.getData(new Types.Some());
print(value.type.toString() + " = ");
if (value instanceof Values.StreamElement || value instanceof Values.StreamEnd) {
const values = [value];
let count = 0;
while (!(values[values.length - 1] instanceof Values.StreamEnd) && values.length <= maxLength) {
values.push(input.getData(new Types.Some(), ++count));
}
trimmedPrint(values, print);
return;
}
printValue(value, print);
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 8,712 |
{"url":"https:\/\/www.skepticalcommunity.com\/viewtopic.php?p=961412","text":"## Humans Need Not Apply\n\nWe are the Borg.\nRob Lister\nPosts: 23332\nJoined: Sun Jul 18, 2004 7:15 pm\nTitle: Incipient toppler\nLocation: Swimming in Lake Ed\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nDoctor X wrote:A computer simply has the ability to run every conceivable move and calculate the probabilities.\n\nA human could do the same . . . if he had the patience . . . and could live a million years.\n\n--J.D.\nNot so. The computer too would have to live a million years. Brute force computer chess is a thing of the way-past and it was never really that good when constrained by time, as all tournament games are.\n\nToday's AI players use strategies somewhat similar to those humans use. Minimax being just one.\nsparks\nPosts: 17028\nJoined: Fri Oct 26, 2007 4:13 pm\nLocation: Friar McWallclocks Bar -- Where time stands still while you lean over!\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nComputers do not learn. They simply process information based on a well defined set of instructions.\n\nLearning would require an independent goal.\n\nThey do not have such. And it cannot be programmed for them by others.\n\nWe will get very much better at a simulation of intelligence, but our creations will never ... think for themselves.\nYou can lead them to knowledge, but you can't make them think.\nWitness\nPosts: 33213\nJoined: Thu Sep 19, 2013 5:50 pm\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nsparks wrote:Computers do not learn. They simply process information based on a well defined set of instructions.\n\nLearning would require an independent goal.\n\nThey do not have such. And it cannot be programmed for them by others.\n\nWe will get very much better at a simulation of intelligence, but our creations will never ... think for themselves.\nYou're in deep waters there, sparky.\n\nFirst let me state that computers\/AI\/robots don't have to \"think\" (whatever that means), they just have \u2013 and if I remember well, that was one of the points of the vid in the OP \u2013 to be good enough at their tasks. Driving cars better than the average Joe. Mixing or writing music better than the average Joe. Playing chess, or go, better than the average Joe (or even Grand Masters ). Prattling small talk better than the average Joe (and that's the Turing test in a nutshell).\n\nSome here addressed the point, so perhaps you're now convinced that computers can effectively learn. The \"set of instructions\" is of course \"well defined\", but you are conflating levels: the fixed part is just like an OS for the AI (or the blood\/chemicals allowing our brains to work), inside of that there are parameters (lots of parameters) or even code (for genetic algorithms) which get fine-tuned, for the task at hand, essentially by trial and error. Like good old nature (what a bitch), just faster.\n\nAs for the goal, I should hope that we set that. I think a good example would be the annual DARPA contest, where vehicles have to travel as fast as possible (and without crashing, of course) from some point A to some point B through rough terrain. The goal is clear, the zillions of local decisions are up to the machine.\n\nYour last point, about the \"simulation of intelligence\", seems philosophical to me as I can see no clear border between unintelligent\/intelligent. (That's the strength of the Turing test as it dismisses \"internalities\", consciousness, intelligence even, &c.) To put it slightly unpleasantly: if your lifelong partner simulates love unerringly, won't you accept it as the real thing?\nsparks\nPosts: 17028\nJoined: Fri Oct 26, 2007 4:13 pm\nLocation: Friar McWallclocks Bar -- Where time stands still while you lean over!\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\n\"Good enough\" at their tasks says we adequately programmed them, nothing more. They didn't suddenly start seeking goals they invented for themselves. When they do that, I'll concede they're intelligent and can learn after the fashion that we do.\n\nLot's of peeps can be fooled by a computer that meets the Turing test. That simply means the humans are fucking stupid, not that the machines are smart.\n\nWe would love nothing better than to create for ourselves an intellectually equal or superior partner so's we know, at last, that we're not alone. But, alas, the hardware isn't ready for prime time just yet.\nYou can lead them to knowledge, but you can't make them think.\nsparks\nPosts: 17028\nJoined: Fri Oct 26, 2007 4:13 pm\nLocation: Friar McWallclocks Bar -- Where time stands still while you lean over!\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nPerfect. I'd like 5000 sq ft to my order, and I don't want to spend more than 87 cents US.\n\nUmkay?\n\nBTW: \"Soon the robots will built many houses.\" ?? Only if\/when they can properly parse past and future my friend.\nYou can lead them to knowledge, but you can't make them think.\nsparks\nPosts: 17028\nJoined: Fri Oct 26, 2007 4:13 pm\nLocation: Friar McWallclocks Bar -- Where time stands still while you lean over!\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nI know I don't need to remind you that RUR is a work of fiction. And as such, represents our ability to imagine (change our own programming) not the computers ability to imagine (which they don't have because we haven't been able to figure out the code yet) and which, I dare say, we will never accomplish.\nYou can lead them to knowledge, but you can't make them think.\nsparks\nPosts: 17028\nJoined: Fri Oct 26, 2007 4:13 pm\nLocation: Friar McWallclocks Bar -- Where time stands still while you lean over!\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nYou can lead them to knowledge, but you can't make them think.\nWitness\nPosts: 33213\nJoined: Thu Sep 19, 2013 5:50 pm\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nsparks wrote:\"Good enough\" at their tasks says we adequately programmed them, nothing more. They didn't suddenly start seeking goals they invented for themselves. When they do that, I'll concede they're intelligent and can learn after the fashion that we do.\n\nLot's of peeps can be fooled by a computer that meets the Turing test. That simply means the humans are fucking stupid, not that the machines are smart.\n\nWe would love nothing better than to create for ourselves an intellectually equal or superior partner so's we know, at last, that we're not alone. But, alas, the hardware isn't ready for prime time just yet.\n2. More or less agree; still I'm of the \"good enough is OK\" persuasion.\n\n3. Heartily agree.\n\nNow to point 1. Here's an example of something which hasn't been programmed (by us, anyway), but which has goals \u2013 or so it seems to me at least, even if it has no nervous system:\n\nWhat's your take on that kind of robot?\nsparks\nPosts: 17028\nJoined: Fri Oct 26, 2007 4:13 pm\nLocation: Friar McWallclocks Bar -- Where time stands still while you lean over!\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nFascinating. Never underestimate 3.5 billion years of evolution.\nYou can lead them to knowledge, but you can't make them think.\nMentat\nPosts: 10271\nJoined: Tue Nov 13, 2007 11:00 pm\nLocation: Hangar 18\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nBurger-flipping robot begins first shift\nFlippy, a burger-flipping robot, has begun work at a restaurant in Pasadena, Los Angeles.\n\nIt is the first of dozens of locations for the system, which is destined to replace human fast-food workers.\nIt's \"pea-can\", man.\n\nLapis Sells . . . But Who's Buying?\nsparks\nPosts: 17028\nJoined: Fri Oct 26, 2007 4:13 pm\nLocation: Friar McWallclocks Bar -- Where time stands still while you lean over!\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nOne of Gawd's bad hair days perhaps?\nYou can lead them to knowledge, but you can't make them think.\nRob Lister\nPosts: 23332\nJoined: Sun Jul 18, 2004 7:15 pm\nTitle: Incipient toppler\nLocation: Swimming in Lake Ed\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nMentat wrote:Burger-flipping robot begins first shift\nFlippy, a burger-flipping robot, has begun work at a restaurant in Pasadena, Los Angeles.\n\nIt is the first of dozens of locations for the system, which is destined to replace human fast-food workers.\nThat's got to be the dumbest implementation of robotics ever. Besides, Hardee's perfected the burger machine 50 years ago.\nWitness\nPosts: 33213\nJoined: Thu Sep 19, 2013 5:50 pm\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nsparks\nPosts: 17028\nJoined: Fri Oct 26, 2007 4:13 pm\nLocation: Friar McWallclocks Bar -- Where time stands still while you lean over!\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nGreat lookin' legs.\n\nFor a fuckin' fembot.\nYou can lead them to knowledge, but you can't make them think.\nAnaxagoras\nPosts: 28924\nJoined: Wed Mar 19, 2008 5:45 am\nLocation: Yokohama\/Tokyo, Japan\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nThe latter. Probably should have gone in Rob's bionics thread.\nA fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.\nWilliam Shakespeare\nsparks\nPosts: 17028\nJoined: Fri Oct 26, 2007 4:13 pm\nLocation: Friar McWallclocks Bar -- Where time stands still while you lean over!\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nWTF do you think happened to her legs?\n\n'Fess up Listy...\nYou can lead them to knowledge, but you can't make them think.\nWitness\nPosts: 33213\nJoined: Thu Sep 19, 2013 5:50 pm\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nRob Lister wrote:\nMentat wrote:Burger-flipping robot begins first shift\nFlippy, a burger-flipping robot, has begun work at a restaurant in Pasadena, Los Angeles.\n\nIt is the first of dozens of locations for the system, which is destined to replace human fast-food workers.\nThat's got to be the dumbest implementation of robotics ever. Besides, Hardee's perfected the burger machine 50 years ago.\nFlippy the burger-flipping robot that started work this week in a California restaurant has been forced to take a break because it was too slow.\n\nThe robot was installed at a Cali Burger outlet in Pasadena and replaced human cooks.\n\nBut after just one day at work the robot has been taken offline so it can be upgraded to work faster.\n\nIts human helpers are also getting extra training to help the robot keep up with demand.\nhttp:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/technology-43343956\n\nSlavery for everybody, cool.\nWitness\nPosts: 33213\nJoined: Thu Sep 19, 2013 5:50 pm\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nWitness\nPosts: 33213\nJoined: Thu Sep 19, 2013 5:50 pm\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nWho knows, perhaps it really is\nNSFW:\nRob Lister\nPosts: 23332\nJoined: Sun Jul 18, 2004 7:15 pm\nTitle: Incipient toppler\nLocation: Swimming in Lake Ed\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\ned\nPosts: 40137\nJoined: Tue Jun 08, 2004 11:52 pm\nTitle: G_D\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nMentat wrote:Burger-flipping robot begins first shift\nFlippy, a burger-flipping robot, has begun work at a restaurant in Pasadena, Los Angeles.\n\nIt is the first of dozens of locations for the system, which is destined to replace human fast-food workers.\nAnd lets be sure to implement a $15 minimum wage. This space for let Mentat Posts: 10271 Joined: Tue Nov 13, 2007 11:00 pm Location: Hangar 18 ### Re: Humans Need Not Apply ed wrote: Mentat wrote:Burger-flipping robot begins first shift Flippy, a burger-flipping robot, has begun work at a restaurant in Pasadena, Los Angeles. It is the first of dozens of locations for the system, which is destined to replace human fast-food workers. And lets be sure to implement a$15 minimum wage.\n\nI constantly get shit on here for being against minimum wage by you lot. Usually promptly followed by being called a troll the two faced lying asshole who claimed to not call me a troll. So I don't really care to hear about it.\nIt's \"pea-can\", man.\n\nLapis Sells . . . But Who's Buying?\nsparks\nPosts: 17028\nJoined: Fri Oct 26, 2007 4:13 pm\nLocation: Friar McWallclocks Bar -- Where time stands still while you lean over!\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nAutomation eventually must reduce us all to street urchins. Unless, of course, you're the one building the automation.\n\nThen you have a few more years before life in a tent becomes the norm.\nYou can lead them to knowledge, but you can't make them think.\nWitness\nPosts: 33213\nJoined: Thu Sep 19, 2013 5:50 pm\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nThe Daily Star wrote:Sick sex robot fantasy BANNED from world\u2019s first cyborg brothel\n\nIf you really want to click: https:\/\/www.dailystar.co.uk\/news\/latest ... ed-fantasy\nGrammatron\nPosts: 35770\nJoined: Tue Jun 08, 2004 1:21 am\nLocation: Los Angeles, CA\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nGrammatron\nPosts: 35770\nJoined: Tue Jun 08, 2004 1:21 am\nLocation: Los Angeles, CA\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nDoctor X\nPosts: 73547\nJoined: Fri Jun 04, 2004 8:09 pm\nTitle: Collective Messiah\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nSo it is a x[X--Ed.]erox. . . .\n\n--J.D.\nMob of the Mean: Free beanie, cattle-prod and Charley Fan Club!\n\"Doctor X is just treating you the way he treats everyone--as subhuman crap too dumb to breathe in after you breathe out.\" \u2013 Don\nDocX: FTW. \u2013 sparks\n\"Doctor X wins again.\" \u2013 Pyrrho\n\"Never sorry to make a racist Fucktard cry.\" \u2013 His Humble MagNIfIcence\n\"It was the criticisms of Doc X, actually, that let me see more clearly how far the hypocrisy had gone.\" \u2013 clarsct\n\"I'd leave it up to Doctor X who has been a benevolent tyrant so far.\" \u2013 Grammatron\n\"Indeed you are a river to your people.\nShit. That's going to end up in your sig.\" \u2013 Pyrrho\n\"Try a twelve step program and accept Doctor X as your High Power.\" \u2013 asthmatic camel\n\"just like Doc X said.\" \u2013 gnome\n\nWS CHAMPIONS X4!!!! NBA CHAMPIONS!! Stanley Cup! SB CHAMPIONS X6!!!!!!\ned\nPosts: 40137\nJoined: Tue Jun 08, 2004 11:52 pm\nTitle: G_D\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nAbdul Alhazred wrote:Food Lion to deploy robot associates to 171 stores\nThe Produce News\n...\n\nThese friendly robotic associates have been roaming the aisles of several Giant\/Martin\u2019s stores since last year, and now Food Lion is also putting the concept to the test. Marty maneuvers around using advanced artificial intelligence and the same laser imaging technology found in self-driving vehicles. He can perform checks that help the store run more smoothly and safely for both customers and associates.\n\nMarty clean sweeps the store 12 times each day to identify slip and fall hazards on the floor and alert associates. When he finds a severe hazard, he pages associates and positions himself by the spill, notifying customers to be cautious. Marty can also scan the shelves for out-of-stocks and to check that shelf pricing is aligned with the front end register system.\n\n...\nI think we should go for a \\$25 minimum wage.\nThis space for let\nGrammatron\nPosts: 35770\nJoined: Tue Jun 08, 2004 1:21 am\nLocation: Los Angeles, CA\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nRob Lister\nPosts: 23332\nJoined: Sun Jul 18, 2004 7:15 pm\nTitle: Incipient toppler\nLocation: Swimming in Lake Ed\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nI know they're very loud and not likely to sneak up on you but if you arm that thing with a few nasty looking weapons and multiply it by a few dozen there's no enemy in the world that wouldn't retreat.\n\nIs that Boston Dynamics?\nAnaxagoras\nPosts: 28924\nJoined: Wed Mar 19, 2008 5:45 am\nLocation: Yokohama\/Tokyo, Japan\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nWasn't Boston Dynamics bought out by Google?\n\nThey were, but then google sold it to Softbank (Japanese mobile phone company)\n\nCould be that because Boston Dynamics makes robots with potential military applications, it didn't fit with Google's brand image.\nA fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.\nWilliam Shakespeare\nWitness\nPosts: 33213\nJoined: Thu Sep 19, 2013 5:50 pm\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nScientists at Oxford say they've invented an artificial intelligence system that can lip-read better than humans.\n\nThe system, which has been trained on thousands of hours of BBC News programmes, has been developed in collaboration with Google's DeepMind AI division.\n\n\"Watch, Attend and Spell\", as the system has been called, can now watch silent speech and get about 50% of the words correct. That may not sound too impressive - but when the researchers supplied the same clips to professional lip-readers, they got only 12% of words right.\nhttp:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/technology-39298199\nAnaxagoras\nPosts: 28924\nJoined: Wed Mar 19, 2008 5:45 am\nLocation: Yokohama\/Tokyo, Japan\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nI question whether there's any such thing as a \"professional lip-reader\"? Maybe as a side gig. What's the demand for lip-reading services? Spooks I suppose?\nA fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.\nWilliam Shakespeare\nWitness\nPosts: 33213\nJoined: Thu Sep 19, 2013 5:50 pm\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nsparks\nPosts: 17028\nJoined: Fri Oct 26, 2007 4:13 pm\nLocation: Friar McWallclocks Bar -- Where time stands still while you lean over!\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nYou can lead them to knowledge, but you can't make them think.\nAnaxagoras\nPosts: 28924\nJoined: Wed Mar 19, 2008 5:45 am\nLocation: Yokohama\/Tokyo, Japan\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nWell, I guess my next question is, if \"professional lip readers\" can only correctly identify 12% of words spoken, what is the practical utility of lip-reading?\nA fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.\nWilliam Shakespeare\nPyrrho\nPosts: 30923\nJoined: Sat Jun 05, 2004 2:17 am\nTitle: Man in Black\nLocation: Division 6\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nThe flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.\nxouper\nPosts: 9756\nJoined: Fri Jun 11, 2004 4:52 am\nTitle: mere ghost of his former self\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nAnaxagoras wrote:. . . if \"professional lip readers\" can only correctly identify 12% of words spoken, what is the practical utility of lip-reading?\nThat reminds me, if you haven't already seen this, here's a comical example of bad lip reading (4 minutes):\nWitness\nPosts: 33213\nJoined: Thu Sep 19, 2013 5:50 pm\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nWe need an acronym for AI BS:\nThe Daily Fail wrote:Would YOU turn your loved one into a robot clone? Swedish scientists are using AI to build androids that are 'fully conscious copies' of dead relatives, report claims\n\n\u2013 Scientists are looking for volunteers to offer up their dead relatives for the study\n\u2013 They would build realistic robot clones based on deceased family and friends\n\u2013 Using artificial intelligence, the scientists can reconstruct the voices of the dead\n\u2013 Experts have previously detailed how we may be able to preserve our dead family members in the future, perhaps by uploading their minds to machines\nhttp:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/sciencetech\/ ... tives.html\n\nSo we'll have 17 generations angrily criticizing us from the mantelpiece? Hope we'll still be able to pull the plug\u2026\nsparks\nPosts: 17028\nJoined: Fri Oct 26, 2007 4:13 pm\nLocation: Friar McWallclocks Bar -- Where time stands still while you lean over!\n\n### Re: Humans Need Not Apply\n\nWhat horseshit this way is flung.\nYou can lead them to knowledge, but you can't make them think.","date":"2021-01-25 11:48:32","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.29735586047172546, \"perplexity\": 7440.539008505165}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-04\/segments\/1610703565541.79\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20210125092143-20210125122143-00091.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
\section{Introduction}
\begin{table*}
\caption{
Fundamental parameters of Bp stars, SPB stars and normal B stars.
We give, in order,
HD number,
rotation period or main pulsation period for Bp stars and SPB stars
respectively,
effective longitudinal magnetic field,
absolute visual magnitude,
mass,
effective temperature,
luminosity,
surface gravity,
radius,
distance
and relative uncertainty of parallax.
}
\label{Bp_SPB_B}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c c c}
\hline
HD & $P$ [d] & $\left<B_l\right>$ [G] & M$_v$ & $M / M_\odot$ & $\log(T_{\rm eff})$ & $\log(L / L_\odot)$ & $\log g$ & $R / R_\odot$ & d [pc] & $\sigma(\pi) / \pi$\\
\hline
\multicolumn{11}{c}{Bp stars}\\
\hline
5737&21.6454 & 324&$-$2.27 & 4.976 $\pm$ 0.335 & 4.121 $\pm$ 0.013 & 3.068 $\pm$ 0.156 & 3.50 $\pm$ 0.14 & 6.54 $\pm$ 1.24 & 206& 0.173 \\
12767&1.892 & 242&$-$0.54 & 3.643 $\pm$ 0.152 & 4.111 $\pm$ 0.013 & 2.369 $\pm$ 0.085 & 4.03 $\pm$ 0.09 & 3.06 $\pm$ 0.35 & 111 & 0.086 \\
19832 &0.727893 &315 &0.34 & 3.142 $\pm$ 0.144 & 4.095 $\pm$ 0.013 & 2.008 $\pm$ 0.096 & 4.26 $\pm$ 0.10 & 2.17 $\pm$ 0.27 & 114 & 0.100 \\
21699&2.4765 &828 &$-$1.06 & 4.314 $\pm$ 0.235 & 4.159 $\pm$ 0.013 & 2.660 $\pm$ 0.118 & 4.00 $\pm$ 0.11 & 3.44 $\pm$ 0.51 & 180 & 0.127 \\
22470&0.6785 &733 &$-$0.67 & 3.736 $\pm$ 0.179 & 4.115 $\pm$ 0.013 & 2.424 $\pm$ 0.111 & 4.00 $\pm$ 0.11 & 3.20 $\pm$ 0.45 & 145 & 0.119 \\
24155&2.53465 &1034 &0.30 & 3.353 $\pm$ 0.176 & 4.132 $\pm$ 0.013 & 2.059 $\pm$ 0.112 & 4.38 $\pm$ 0.11 & 1.95 $\pm$ 0.28 & 136 & 0.121 \\
25823 &4.65853 &668 &$-$0.48 & 3.615 $\pm$ 0.234 & 4.112 $\pm$ 0.026 & 2.343 $\pm$ 0.119 & 4.05 $\pm$ 0.15 & 2.95 $\pm$ 0.54 & 152 & 0.129 \\
28843&1.373813 & 344 &0.05 & 3.555 $\pm$ 0.173 & 4.143 $\pm$ 0.013 & 2.179 $\pm$ 0.103 & 4.33 $\pm$ 0.10 & 2.13 $\pm$ 0.28 & 131& 0.109 \\
34452&2.4687 &527 &$-$0.32 & 3.754 $\pm$ 0.212 & 4.158 $\pm$ 0.026 & 2.270 $\pm$ 0.093 & 4.33 $\pm$ 0.14 & 2.20 $\pm$ 0.35 & 137& 0.096 \\
49333&2.18010 &618 &$-$0.56 & 4.289 $\pm$ 0.262 & 4.182 $\pm$ 0.013 & 2.538 $\pm$ 0.134 & 4.21 $\pm$ 0.12 & 2.68 $\pm$ 0.44 & 205& 0.148 \\
64740&1.33026 &587 &$-$2.15 & 8.740 $\pm$ 0.407 & 4.353 $\pm$ 0.013 & 3.761 $\pm$ 0.107 & 3.98 $\pm$ 0.10 & 4.99 $\pm$ 0.69 & 221& 0.115 \\
73340&2.66753 &1644 &$-$0.11 & 3.667 $\pm$ 0.130 & 4.145 $\pm$ 0.013 & 2.253 $\pm$ 0.068 & 4.28 $\pm$ 0.08 & 2.30 $\pm$ 0.23 & 143& 0.063 \\
92664 &1.67315 &803 &$-$0.32 & 3.863 $\pm$ 0.147 & 4.154 $\pm$ 0.013 & 2.357 $\pm$ 0.075 & 4.24 $\pm$ 0.09 & 2.47 $\pm$ 0.26 & 143& 0.073 \\
125823 &8.8171&328& $-$1.08& 5.882 $\pm$ 0.260& 4.265 $\pm$ 0.012& 3.054 $\pm$ 0.094& 4.16 $\pm$ 0.09& 3.32 $\pm$ 0.40& 128& 0.098 \\
133652&2.3040&1116 &0.74 & 3.050 $\pm$ 0.132 & 4.113 $\pm$ 0.013 & 1.863 $\pm$ 0.089 & 4.46 $\pm$ 0.09 & 1.69 $\pm$ 0.20 & 96 & 0.092 \\
137509&4.4912 &1062 &$-$0.29 & 3.367 $\pm$ 0.203 & 4.076 $\pm$ 0.022 & 2.268 $\pm$ 0.138 & 3.95 $\pm$ 0.14 & 3.21 $\pm$ 0.60 & 249 & 0.152 \\
142301&1.45955 &2104 &$-$0.28 & 4.243 $\pm$ 0.289 & 4.193 $\pm$ 0.013 & 2.470 $\pm$ 0.151 & 4.32 $\pm$0.14 & 2.36 $\pm$ 0.43 & 140 & 0.168 \\
142990&0.9791 &1304 &$-$0.80 & 4.902 $\pm$ 0.260 & 4.217 $\pm$ 0.013 & 2.765 $\pm$ 0.114 & 4.18 $\pm$ 0.11 & 2.97 $\pm$ 0.43 & 150 & 0.123 \\
144334&1.49497 &783 &$-$0.31 & 4.085 $\pm$ 0.256 & 4.167 $\pm$ 0.024 & 2.465 $\pm$ 0.118 & 4.20 $\pm$ 0.15 & 2.65 $\pm$ 0.46 & 149 & 0.128 \\
147010&3.920676 &4032 &0.59 & 3.137 $\pm$ 0.180 & 4.117 $\pm$ 0.013 & 1.931 $\pm$ 0.125 & 4.42 $\pm$ 0.12 & 1.80 $\pm$ 0.28 & 143 & 0.136 \\
151965&1.60841 &2603 &$-$0.10 & 3.736 $\pm$ 0.245 & 4.154 $\pm$ 0.013 & 2.272 $\pm$ 0.145 & 4.31 $\pm$ 0.13 & 2.25 $\pm$ 0.40 & 181 & 0.161 \\
168733&14.78437 &815 &$-$1.16 & 4.015 $\pm$ 0.230 & 4.108 $\pm$ 0.020 & 2.614 $\pm$ 0.131 & 3.81 $\pm$ 0.14 & 4.12 $\pm$ 0.73 & 190 & 0.144 \\
175362&3.67375 &3569 &$-$0.38 & 3.986 $\pm$ 0.267 & 4.164 $\pm$ 0.030 & 2.404 $\pm$ 0.114 & 4.24 $\pm$ 0.17 & 2.50 $\pm$ 0.47 & 130 & 0.123 \\
196178&1.91645 &1069 &$-$0.13 & 3.542 $\pm$ 0.162 & 4.126 $\pm$ 0.013 & 2.227 $\pm$ 0.096 & 4.22 $\pm$ 0.10 & 2.43 $\pm$ 0.30 & 147 & 0.100 \\
\hline
\multicolumn{11}{c}{SPB stars}\\
\hline
3360&1.5625 & $-$& $-$2.78& 8.582 $\pm$ 0.388& 4.324 $\pm$ 0.004& 3.827 $\pm$ 0.105& 3.79 $\pm$ 0.09& 6.15 $\pm$ 0.75& 183& 0.112 \\
3379&0.54937 & 182&$-$1.38& 5.524 $\pm$ 0.398& 4.237 $\pm$ 0.004& 3.024 $\pm$ 0.167& 4.06 $\pm$ 0.14& 3.64 $\pm$ 0.70& 262& 0.186 \\
21071&0.84145 & $-$&$-$0.51& 3.999 $\pm$ 0.230& 4.157 $\pm$ 0.003& 2.453 $\pm$ 0.133& 4.17 $\pm$ 0.11& 2.74 $\pm$ 0.42& 185& 0.146 \\
24587&0.86438 & $-$&$-$0.69& 3.969 $\pm$ 0.149& 4.141 $\pm$ 0.002& 2.496 $\pm$ 0.087& 4.06 $\pm$ 0.07& 3.09 $\pm$ 0.31& 118& 0.089 \\
26326&1.87336 & $-$&$-$1.39& 4.820 $\pm$ 0.324& 4.182 $\pm$ 0.003& 2.871 $\pm$ 0.156& 3.93 $\pm$ 0.13& 3.94 $\pm$ 0.71& 223& 0.174 \\
27026& 0.61387 & $-$& 0.70& 2.936 $\pm$ 0.118& 4.082 $\pm$ 0.002& 1.869 $\pm$ 0.093& 4.32 $\pm$ 0.08& 1.97 $\pm$ 0.21& 119& 0.097 \\
27396&2.16826 & $-$&$-$1.42& 4.879 $\pm$ 0.222& 4.185 $\pm$ 0.003& 2.892 $\pm$ 0.105& 3.93 $\pm$ 0.09& 3.98 $\pm$ 0.49& 142& 0.112 \\
28114&2.04842 & $-$&$-$0.81& 4.228 $\pm$ 0.305& 4.163 $\pm$ 0.003& 2.589 $\pm$ 0.167& 4.08 $\pm$ 0.14& 3.11 $\pm$ 0.60& 183& 0.187 \\
34798&1.27632 & $-$&$-$0.63& 4.458 $\pm$ 0.337& 4.193 $\pm$ 0.003& 2.600 $\pm$ 0.175& 4.21 $\pm$ 0.14& 2.74 $\pm$ 0.55& 243& 0.197 \\
53921&1.65180 & 185&$-$0.27& 3.714 $\pm$ 0.129& 4.137 $\pm$ 0.002& 2.322 $\pm$ 0.080& 4.18 $\pm$ 0.07& 2.58 $\pm$ 0.24& 148& 0.080 \\
74195&2.81889 & 200&$-$2.32& 6.042 $\pm$ 0.204& 4.208 $\pm$ 0.003& 3.320 $\pm$ 0.078& 3.69 $\pm$ 0.07& 5.85 $\pm$ 0.53& 152& 0.077 \\
74560&1.55106 & 146&$-$0.97& 4.863 $\pm$ 0.152& 4.210 $\pm$ 0.004& 2.783 $\pm$ 0.071& 4.13 $\pm$ 0.06& 3.13 $\pm$ 0.26& 147& 0.068 \\
92287&4.65549 & $-$&$-$2.18& 5.978 $\pm$ 0.459& 4.215 $\pm$ 0.004& 3.283 $\pm$ 0.178& 3.74 $\pm$ 0.15& 5.43 $\pm$ 1.12& 392& 0.200 \\
123515&1.45926 & $-$&$-$0.03& 3.235 $\pm$ 0.151& 4.079 $\pm$ 0.002& 2.154 $\pm$ 0.108& 4.06 $\pm$ 0.09& 2.77 $\pm$ 0.35& 168& 0.116 \\
138764&1.25881 & $-$&$-$0.22& 3.777 $\pm$ 0.147& 4.148 $\pm$ 0.003& 2.321 $\pm$ 0.090& 4.24 $\pm$ 0.07& 2.45 $\pm$ 0.25& 108& 0.092 \\
140873&0.868432 & 231&$-$0.31& 3.788 $\pm$ 0.138& 4.144 $\pm$ 0.003& 2.349 $\pm$ 0.084& 4.19 $\pm$ 0.07& 2.58 $\pm$ 0.25& 125& 0.085 \\
147394&1.24958 & $-$&$-$1.06& 4.403 $\pm$ 0.115& 4.165 $\pm$ 0.003& 2.692 $\pm$ 0.060& 4.00 $\pm$ 0.05& 3.46 $\pm$ 0.24& 96& 0.051 \\
160762& 4.02739 & $-$&$-$2.09& 6.136 $\pm$ 0.222& 4.234 $\pm$ 0.004& 3.299 $\pm$ 0.084& 3.82 $\pm$ 0.07& 5.06 $\pm$ 0.50& 152& 0.085 \\
169820&0.47057 & 147& 0.87& 2.789 $\pm$ 0.111& 4.071 $\pm$ 0.002& 1.770 $\pm$ 0.092& 4.35 $\pm$ 0.08& 1.85 $\pm$ 0.20& 115& 0.095 \\
181558&1.23793 & 201&$-$0.58& 4.130 $\pm$ 0.274& 4.166 $\pm$ 0.003& 2.504 $\pm$ 0.154& 4.17 $\pm$ 0.13& 2.77 $\pm$ 0.49& 208& 0.171 \\
182255&1.26216 & $-$&$-$0.36& 3.860 $\pm$ 0.139& 4.149 $\pm$ 0.003& 2.379 $\pm$ 0.083& 4.19 $\pm$ 0.07& 2.60 $\pm$ 0.25& 123& 0.084 \\
206540&1.38887 & $-$&$-$0.71& 4.014 $\pm$ 0.269& 4.145 $\pm$ 0.003& 2.512 $\pm$ 0.155& 4.06 $\pm$ 0.13& 3.08 $\pm$ 0.55& 214& 0.173 \\
208057&1.24732 & 133&$-$0.99& 5.007 $\pm$ 0.225& 4.220 $\pm$ 0.004& 2.817 $\pm$ 0.103& 4.15 $\pm$ 0.09& 3.12 $\pm$ 0.38& 157& 0.110 \\
215573&1.83857 & 174&$-$0.42& 3.844 $\pm$ 0.114& 4.144 $\pm$ 0.003& 2.393 $\pm$ 0.068& 4.16 $\pm$ 0.06& 2.71 $\pm$ 0.22& 136& 0.064 \\
\hline
\multicolumn{11}{c}{normal B stars}\\
\hline
134837& $-$ & $-$ & 0.75& 2.997 $\pm$ 0.116& 4.097 $\pm$ 0.002& 1.877 $\pm$ 0.089& 4.38 $\pm$ 0.07& 1.86 $\pm$ 0.19& 111& 0.092 \\
142378& $-$ & $-$ & $-$0.99& 4.832 $\pm$ 0.350& 4.206 $\pm$ 0.004& 2.782 $\pm$ 0.167& 4.12 $\pm$ 0.14& 3.18 $\pm$ 0.62& 191& 0.187 \\
164245& $-$ & $-$ & $-$0.81& 3.870 $\pm$ 0.271& 4.112 $\pm$ 0.002& 2.520 $\pm$ 0.162& 3.91 $\pm$ 0.13& 3.63 $\pm$ 0.68& 221& 0.181 \\
205265& $-$ & $-$ & $-$0.36& 3.634 $\pm$ 0.282& 4.117 $\pm$ 0.002& 2.342 $\pm$ 0.180& 4.08 $\pm$ 0.15& 2.89 $\pm$ 0.60& 213& 0.203 \\
212986& $-$ & $-$ & $-$0.58& 3.961 $\pm$ 0.221& 4.148 $\pm$ 0.003& 2.463 $\pm$ 0.129& 4.12 $\pm$ 0.11& 2.88 $\pm$ 0.43& 249& 0.142 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}\\
\end{table*}
Different types of B stars co-exist at the same position of the H-R diagram, which coincides with the instability strip
of slowly pulsating B stars (SPB stars). SPB stars are very promising targets for asteroseismic studies because
these B-type stars with masses between 3 and 9\,M$_\odot$ pulsate in many high-order gravity-modes. This makes it
possible to probe very deep layers in the stellar interior of this kind of stars. Beside SPB stars, we find chemically
peculiar Bp stars, which show abnormal abundances of certain chemical elements in their atmosphere. They possess
variable magnetic fields and show light and line-profile variations which are interpreted within the framework
of the oblique rotator model. As the star rotates, we observe the magnetic field and inhomogeneous surface abundance
distributions from various aspects, resulting in the observed variability. In addition, there are also non-pulsating
normal B stars at the same position of the H-R diagram.
With the aim to improve stellar structure models of high mass stars we need to explain the co-existence of these three
groups of stars in the SPB instability strip. Several physical processes have been put forward, but a clear scenario
is not yet established. For instance, a slow rotation rate is assumed a necessary condition for a star to become
chemically peculiar, but it does not seem to be a sufficient condition since both the groups of SPB stars and Bp stars
consist of slow rotators. A difference of metallicity between SPB stars and normal B stars could be invoked to
explain that only some main-sequence B-type stars reach observable pulsation amplitudes. However, the recent study of
Niemczura\ (\cite{niemczura}) showed that SPB stars do not differ from the normal B-type stars as far as the
metallicity is concerned. Recently, we presented the results of a magnetic survey of a sample of 26 SPB stars
with FORS\,1 at the VLT. A weak
mean longitudinal magnetic field of the order of a few hundred Gauss has been detected
in 13 SPB stars (Hubrig et al.\ \cite{hubrig3}). All magnetic SPB stars for which we gathered several
magnetic field measurements show a field that varies in time. However, we were not able to find any relation between
the fundamental parameters of this group of stars and the presence of magnetic fields in their atmospheres.
To search for the connections and differences that could exist between the different types of stars, we have carried out
a comparative study between a sample of well-studied Bp stars with known periods and magnetic field strengths,
a sample of confirmed and well-studied B-type pulsators and a sample of normal B stars. The selection of our star
samples is described in Sect.\,2. In Sect.\,3 we determine the fundamental stellar parameters. In Sect.\,4 we
compare the three groups, by focussing on stellar evolutionary state, stellar rotation and stellar magnetic field strengths. In Sect.\,5 we perform a comparison of Geneva photometric variability of Bp and SPB stars.
We end with a discussion in Sect.\,6.
\section{Selection of star samples}
We selected our sample of magnetic Bp stars from the recent catalogues of Bychkov et al.\ (\cite{bychkov1}) and
Hubrig et al.\ (\cite{hubrig2}). We considered stars with masses between 3 and 9\,M$_\odot$, for which the periods
and magnetic field strengths are known. Note that we did not include Bp stars with the PGa and HgMn peculiarity as
the presence of very weak magnetic fields has been confirmed only in a small sample of these stars. Furthermore,
the structure of
the detected magnetic field in these stars should be sufficiently tangled as it does not produce a strong net
observable circular polarization signature (Hubrig et al.\ \cite{hubrig2}).
Our selected sample of Bp stars consists of He-weak stars and Si stars with $T_{\rm eff}$ in the same range as
the studied SPB stars. The hottest star is He-rich.
The number of candidate SPB stars has increased from 12 to more than 80 thanks to the Hipparcos
mission (Waelkens et al.\ \cite{waelkens}). The way of classification used by the latter authors does not allow to
discriminate chemically peculiar variables falling in the SPB domain from real SPB stars. Therefore, it may be possible
that some candidate SPB stars are actually Bp stars, as was discovered for four stars by means of a detailed
spectroscopic study (Briquet et al.\ \cite{briquet}). For this reason, only confirmed SPB stars were included
in our SPB star sample. The list of stars was retrieved from De Cat (\cite{decat1}). The normal B stars were
selected as standard B-type stars in the photometric system of Geneva.
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\includegraphics[angle=-90,width=13cm]{6940fig1.ps}
\caption{The position of the stars in our samples in a ($\log T_{\rm eff},\log g$) diagram. The Bp stars, pulsating stars and normal
B stars are represented by triangles, circles and squares, respectively. The full lines represent boundaries of
theoretical instability strips for modes with frequency between 0.25 and 25 c d$^{-1}$ and $\ell \leq 4$, computed for main sequence models with 2 M$_\odot$ $\leq M \leq$ 15 M$_\odot$ by De Cat et al.\ (\cite{decat2}).
The lower and upper dotted lines show the ZAMS and TAMS, respectively. The dashed lines denote evolution tracks
for stars with $M = 12, 9, 6,$ and 3\,M$_\odot$. Filled symbols correspond to stars with detected magnetic fields.}
\label{HR}
\end{figure*}
Because the colours of Bp stars are anomalous, the usual photometric calibrations allowing to estimate $\log g$ for normal B stars (e.g. in the Geneva system) are much less reliable for them; photometry can still provide useful information in a statistical sense, but only for very large samples. Few $\log g$ values determined spectroscopically are available, especially for SPB stars. Therefore, the only
consistent way to determine the position of the stars of the three samples in the H-R diagram is to use Hipparcos
parallaxes. For this study we selected exclusively stars for which very accurate parallaxes,
(i.e., with $\sigma (\pi)/ \pi < 0.2$) and Geneva or Str\"omgren photometry are available. Our whole sample
consists of 24 Bp stars, 24 SPB stars and 5 normal B stars.
They are listed in Table\,\ref{Bp_SPB_B}.
\section{Determination of stellar parameters}
The effective temperature was determined using reddening-free photometric parameters in the Geneva photometric system through the calibration of K\"unzli et al.\ (\cite{kunzli}). In the case of Bp stars, the calibration was corrected for the anomalous colours according to the prescriptions described by North\ (\cite{north2}). The luminosity was obtained from Hipparcos parallaxes using bolometric corrections measured by Lanz\ (\cite{lanz}).
Following the recommendation by Arenou\ (\cite{arenou}) that the Lutz-Kelker correction (Lutz \& Kelker\ \cite{lutz}) should not
be used for individual stars, no such correction was applied to the absolute magnitudes of our targets.
For binary systems, a duplicity correction to the magnitude was taken into account. For SB2 systems, this correction is estimated from mass
ratios available in the literature. For SB1 systems a statistical correction of 0.1 mag was adopted. In our SPB sample,
HD\,123515, HD\,140873, HD\,24587, HD\,53921, HD\,74560, HD\,92287 and HD\,160762 are SB systems according to
De Cat et al.\ (\cite{decat3}), De Cat \& Aerts\ (\cite{decat_aerts}) and Abt \& Levi\ (\cite{abt}). It means that $\sim$ 1/3 of SPB stars in our sample belong
to binary systems. This number is representative for SPB stars in general (De Cat\ \cite{decat1}). In our Bp sample, there is only
one SB1 system: HD\,25823 (Wolff\ \cite{wolff}). The lack of binary systems among Bp stars had already been noticed by
Gerbaldi et al.\ (\cite{gerbaldi}).
The interstellar reddening was taken into account for stars farther away than 100 pc, from reddening-free parameters
X and Y of Geneva photometry and Cramer's intrinsic [UBV] colours (Cramer\ \cite{cramer}) and verified using the interstellar absorption maps of Lucke\ (\cite{lucke}). The latter precaution was needed for a few stars, the reddening of which is overestimated by Cramer's method, due to the anomalous reddening law in the region of the Upper Sco association.
The mass was obtained from interpolation in the evolutionary tracks of Schaller et al.\ (\cite{schaller}) assuming
solar metallicity. It is generally expected that Bp stars follow standard, solar composition evolutionary tracks
and the surface chemical
anomalies are produced by the process of selective radiative diffusion in the presence of a magnetic field.
The radius was directly computed from luminosity and effective temperature with
\smallskip
$\log (R/R_\odot) = \frac{1}{2} \log(L/L_\odot) - 2 \log(T_{\rm eff}/T_{\rm eff \odot})$.
\smallskip
Finally, the surface gravity was obtained from mass and radius through its fundamental definition.
More details on the determination of the stellar parameters can be found in Hubrig et al.\ (\cite{hubrig1}).
The basic data for the three samples, Bp stars, SPB stars and normal B stars, are
presented in Table\,\ref{Bp_SPB_B}. Note that, for HD\,125823, we considered the more accurate effective temperature
and gravity derived by Hunger \& Groote\ (\cite{hunger}) by means of the IR flux method.
The distribution of all targets in a ($\log T_{\rm eff},\log g$) diagram is shown in Fig.~\ref{HR}.
\section{Comparisons}
\subsection{Evolutionary state}
It is quite clear from Fig.~\ref{HR} that the majority of Bp stars is rather young, with a location close to
the zero-age main sequence (ZAMS). The SPB stars are significantly older whereas normal B-type stars are distributed
over the whole width of the main sequence.
In Fig.~\ref{cumu} we show the cumulative distribution of $\log g$ for the studied Bp and SPB stars. We note that
the $\log g$ range of SPB stars perfectly agrees with evolutionary main-sequence models; the same is true of Bp stars, if one excepts HD 5737, which has the smallest surface gravity of all stars of its kind in our sample. But this object also has the largest relative error on its parallax, and its $\log g$ value is less than 2$\sigma$ smaller than the minimum value of the SPB stars. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov test shows that the distribution of $\log g$ values for the Bp stars differs from the distribution
for SPB stars at a significance level of 98.3 \%. Obviously, the group of Bp stars is younger than the group of SPB stars. The conclusion remains valid if we compare distributions of radius rather than $\log g$.
It is of further interest that the position of SPB stars with detected magnetic fields indicates that they are
younger than SPB stars with no magnetic detections. However, to confirm this clue, further systematic searches for magnetic fields
in a larger sample of SPB stars should be conducted.
As a check that this conclusion is not biased by the distributions of the relative errors of Hipparcos parallaxes we displayed this
distribution in Fig.~\ref{spi} as a histogram for both samples. The average parallax uncertainty is 12 \% for both Bp and SPB stars.
According to a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, the distributions do not differ at a significant level, so that no systematic bias has been
introduced in the $\log g$ cumulative distributions.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{6940fig2.eps}
\caption{Cumulative distribution of $\log g$ for the Bp stars (full line) and the SPB stars (dotted line).}
\label{cumu}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{6940fig3.eps}
\caption{Distribution of the relative errors of the Hipparcos parallaxes for the Bp stars (full line) and the SPB stars (dotted line).}
\label{spi}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{6940fig4.eps}
\caption{Distribution of $v$\,sin\,$i$ values for the Bp stars (full line) and the SPB stars (dotted line) in our sample.}
\label{vsini}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{6940fig5.eps}
\caption{Distribution of rotation periods $P$ of Bp stars (full line) and of pulsation periods of SPB stars
(dotted line).}
\label{p}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{6940fig6.eps}
\caption{Distribution of the longitudinal magnetic field values $\left<B_l\right>$ for the Bp stars (full line) and the SPB stars (dotted line).}
\label{mag}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{6940fig7.eps}
\caption{Averaged quadratic effective magnetic field for Bp stars (filled stars) and SPB stars (filled circles)
versus $\log g$.
}
\label{logg_Heff}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Rotation and magnetic field strength}
It is well-known that both Bp and SPB stars are slow rotators. The distributions of the projected rotational
velocities $v$\,sin\,$i$ acquired from the SIMBAD data base for the sample of Bp stars and of SPB stars are shown in Fig.~\ref{vsini}.
Apparently, they are slightly different with a maximum in the bin 0--25\,km/s for SPB stars and a maximum
around 50--75 \,km/s for Bp stars.
The knowledge of rotation periods of SPB stars is very poor and only very few of them
have periods indirectly determined by mode identification methods (De Cat et~al.\ \cite{decat4}). On the other hand, it is remarkable that the pulsation periods of these stars are very similar
to the rotation periods of Bp stars. This fact led to some confusion in previous studies of SPB stars, where the variations of
spectral line profiles
with an inhomogeneous distribution of Si and He had first been assumed to be caused by non-radial pulsations (Briquet et~al.\ \cite{briquet}).
In Fig.~\ref{p} we present the distributions of the rotation periods of Bp stars and pulsation periods of SPB stars. The periods, given in Table\,\ref{Bp_SPB_B} in column 2, were retrieved from
the catalogue of magnetic rotational phase curves of CP stars by Bychkov et al.\ (\cite{bychkov2}) and from De Cat\ (\cite{decat1}). Both distributions are very similar in that they show a maximum between 1 and 2 days.
Magnetic Bp stars generally have large-scale organized magnetic
fields. Most studies of their magnetic fields are based on measurements of the
mean longitudinal magnetic field which is an average over the visible stellar
hemisphere of the component of the magnetic vector along the line of sight.
Bychkov et al.\ (\cite{bychkov1}) presented a catalogue of averaged stellar effective magnetic fields of chemically peculiar A and B type stars. For the SPB stars in our sample
we used the rms mean longitudinal magnetic fields determined by Hubrig et al.\ (\cite{hubrig3}). The rms mean longitudinal magnetic fields are presented in column 3 of Table\,\ref{Bp_SPB_B}.
The distribution presented in Fig.~\ref{mag} clearly shows
that longitudinal magnetic fields in SPB stars are significantly weaker in comparison to the magnetic fields
detected in Bp stars.
In Fig.~\ref{logg_Heff} we present the evolution of the averaged quadratic effective magnetic
field $\left<B_l\right>$ in Bp and SPB stars over the main sequence.
The value $\log g$ is used as a proxy for the relative age and has the advantage
of being a directly measured quantity.
It is quite obvious that the strongest magnetic fields appear in young Bp stars.
The fact that strong magnetic fields are only observed in a restricted
range of evolutionary states can be interpreted as a hint for a magnetic field decay in stars at advanced ages.
A similar result has already been presented by Hubrig et~al.\ (\cite{hubrig5})
from magnetic field measurements with FORS\,1 at the VLT.
It is especially intriguing that the
magnetic fields of a few Bp stars either do not show any detectable variations or
vary with periods close to one day, which is of the order of the pulsation
period range of SPB stars
(Bohlender et al.\ \cite{Bohlender1987}, Matthews \& Bohlender\ \cite{Matthews1991}).
The study of stellar parameters of the He-strong star
HD\,96446 with a rotation period of 0.85\,d by Mathys\ (\cite{Mathys1994}) revealed that the radius determined from
considerations of the observed magnetic field structure is far too
small and does not correspond to the spectral type of this star. He suggested that pulsation could be a possible
candidate to explain the variation of the
magnetic field.
Another example suggests that pulsation might be the cause of magnetic field variability in some B-type stars.
Bychkov et~al.\ (\cite{bychkov2}) showed that the detected magnetic field of the star HD\,37151 varies with a period
whose one-day-alias is interpreted as a pulsation period by North \& Paltani\ (\cite{north}),
who also proved this star to be a multiperiodic SPB star. However, further magnetic measurements are necessary to confirm this clue because the rotational phase curve presented for the star only relies on few magnetic data with large error bars.
\section{Geneva photometry}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[angle=-90,width=8cm]{6940fig8_1.ps}\\
\includegraphics[angle=-90,width=8cm]{6940fig8_2.ps}\\
\includegraphics[angle=-90,width=8cm]{6940fig8_3.ps}\\
\includegraphics[angle=-90,width=8cm]{6940fig8_4.ps}\\
\caption{
Comparison between observed photometric amplitude ratios and the amplitudes predicted by stellar pulsation theory.
The theoretical amplitude ratios for modes with $\ell$\,= 1, 2, 3, and 4 are represented
with a red dashed, a green dash-dotted, a blue dotted, and a cyan dash-dot-dot-dotted line, respectively
(the colour representation is only available in the online version of the paper).
The dots indicate the observed amplitude ratios and their standard error.
}
\label{MI}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=8.2cm]{6940fig9.ps}
\caption{Geneva photometric variability of HD\,175362. }
\label{hd175362}
\end{figure}
As already mentioned above, the discrimination between the pulsation and rotation modulation
interpretations is not obvious.
With the aim to find the cause of the observed variability of B-type stars,
we made a comparison of Geneva photometry for our sample of Bp stars and SPB stars
to study the behaviour of passband and colour variability.
In particular, we computed the amplitude ratios,
commonly used to identify pulsation modes (e.g., Dupret et al.\ \cite{dupret}).
The characteristics of the Geneva data for SPB stars can be summarized as follows.
The data in the seven Geneva filters vary as a sine function for each oscillation frequency and are all in phase.
The amplitude is the highest in the U-filter and the typical behaviour of the amplitude ratios computed
against the U-filter is shown in Fig.\,\ref{MI} for the main mode observed for HD\,74195.
In respect to colours, the variation is dominant in U-B and only stars with the highest amplitudes show
clear variability in the other colours, which are thus all in phase or antiphase.
The types of photometric variability of Bp stars are more diversified than for SPB stars (e.g., North\ \cite{north0}).
In almost all cases, the data are only fitted well when one considers the frequency and at least one of its harmonics, which makes a first difference compared to the SPB stars. The amplitude is not necessarily the highest in the U-filter but many of them have a larger amplitude in the B-filter. Variations in colours are generally much more pronounced for Bp stars than for SPB stars and they are not always in phase or antiphase.
For the Bp stars for which we have sufficient Geneva data at our disposal,
we computed amplitude ratios in order to compare them with typical cases of SPB stars.
We found two kinds of behaviour, different from what is predicted by pulsation theory.
The first one is represented for the star HD\,125823 (a Centauri) in Fig.\,\ref{MI}.
This star is one of the best studied among hot peculiar stars
for which the changes in the line strength of the He lines is so conspicuous
that the star can be considered as a He-weak star at one phase and a He-rich star at another phase (Norris\,1968).
Such a behaviour of the photometric amplitude ratios as well as very large equivalent width variations
were also observed for the star HD\,55522 (Briquet et al.\ \cite{briquet}).
The other kind of observed amplitude ratio behaviour is shown in Fig.\,\ref{MI}
and is present in HD\,151965.
In this case, the amplitudes for the B1-, B-, and B2-filters are smaller than that for the U-filter,
but remain too large to be fully compatible with a pulsation model.
For some stars, the amplitude in the V-filter was found also to be too small (Briquet et~al.\ \cite{briquet2}).
There is also another feature found in the Bp stars studied, which concerns their strict monoperiodicity.
When the main period with its harmonics is removed from the data set,
the residual standard deviations are of the order of the error on the data,
indicating that no additional variability is present
or that the variability is of much smaller amplitude than the pulsation amplitudes of SPB stars.
Several Bp stars also show amplitude ratios indistinguishable from the ones of SPB stars.
In Fig.\,\ref{MI} the amplitude ratios of the star HD\,175362 are displayed. The observed ratios are fully in agreement with the theoretical amplitude ratios predicted by pulsation theory. For details on how theoretical amplitude ratios for a pulsating star are computed, we refer to De Cat et~al.\ (\cite{decat2}). The variability in the Geneva passbands and colours are presented in Fig.\,\ref{hd175362}.
Apart from the presence of the first harmonics in the data and an amplitude in the U-filter ($\sim$54 mmag)
larger than the one for typical SPB stars (De Cat\ \cite{decat1}),
the behaviour of the Geneva photometry is similar to the one for an SPB star.
In the literature, the variablitity of HD\,175362 is interpreted in terms of the oblique rotator model.
For instance, Hensler\ (\cite{hensler}) modelled the star with a single He-cap and a single Si-cap located at the opposite magnetic poles.
The case of HD\,175362 illustrates that a spotted star might have photometric variability in perfect agreement with a pulsation model. In that case, it might be that periodicity interpreted as pulsation is actually due to rotation and only spectroscopy can help to make the differentiation.
However, one can alternatively explain the variability of HD\,175362 by non-linear stellar pulsation instead of rotational modulation.
Indeed, there is a striking analogy to the $\beta$~Cephei star $\xi^1$~CMa,
for which the pulsation interpretation is without doubt.
The passbands, colour and amplitude ratio behaviour of HD\,175362 is completely similar to the one of $\xi^1$~CMa,
also in relation to the presence of harmonics in the data set and the large amplitude of the variability.
$\xi^1$~CMa pulsates non-linearly and is apparently monoperiodic.
If additonal modes are present in this pulsating star, they are of much smaller amplitudes than the main mode (Saesen et al.\ \cite{saesen}).
Interestingly, we recently discovered a magnetic field in $\xi^1$~CMa of the order of 300\,G (Hubrig et al.\ \cite{hubrig3}).
From a literature search, we summarize as follows the characteristics of spectral lines of HD\,175362
and their phase relation with the photometric and magnetic field data.
Balona\ (\cite{balona}), Wolff \& Wolff\ (\cite{wolff_wolff}), Hensler\ (\cite{hensler}) and Catalano \& Leone\ (\cite{catalano})
report that the Si\,II line strengths vary in antiphase with helium,
that the velocity variations are in quadrature with the variations of line strength,
and that the light curves are in antiphase with respect to the He line strength.
This does not seem to be incompatible with a pulsation model (De Ridder\ \cite{deridder}). However, a thorough and quantitative comparison is necessary to definitely support a pulsation model or not. This is beyond the scope of this paper.
Wolff \& Wolff\ (\cite{wolff_wolff}), Borra et al.\ (\cite{borra}), Bohlender et al.\ (\cite{Bohlender1987}),
Mathys\ (\cite{mathys}) and Mathys \& Hubrig\ (\cite{mathys_hubrig}) obtained magnetic field measurements and
detected for HD\,175362 a strong magnetic field with a non-sinusoidal variation (see Table\,\ref{Bp_SPB_B}).
The light extrema coincide with the magnetic field extrema
and spectral variations of several elements (Si, C, Fe, Ga) vary in phase with the magnetic field.
It remains to be shown that pulsation may produce the observations reported by the authors above and cause the magnetic variability (Mathys\,\cite{mathys99}).
We found no argument to definitely favour one model.
\section{Discussion}
Our study of the evolutionary age of magnetic Bp and SPB stars with accurate Hipparcos parallaxes and available
Geneva photometry revealed a clear difference in their ages at the significance level of 98.3\%.
The Bp stars show much stronger magnetic fields than the SPB stars and are younger as a group. An interesting possibility raised by these results is that at least some Bp stars may transform themselves into SPB stars as they become older.
Only one Bp star in our sample belongs to an SB1 system whereas $\sim$1/3 of the SPB stars are members of SB systems.
Unfortunately, we could not make a statistical comparison of the distribution of our Bp and SPB star samples with
that for normal B-type stars as only five such stars have accurate Hipparcos parallaxes and available Geneva or
Str\"omgren photometry.
Variation periods of Bp and SPB stars are of the same order.
Such similar distributions of periods with a maximum between 1 and 2~days
makes the interpretation of the observed variability of B-type stars located in the instability strips of SPB stars quite hard.
The difficulty is increased by the fact that stellar rotation with spots
and stellar pulsation may lead to very similar behaviour of the observed photometric variability. The example of HD 175362 teaches us, that a Bp star which actually is a spotted and oblique rotator could well be interpreted in terms of a pulsation model; but that conversely, it is not excluded that a star actually pulsating non-linearly with a dominant main mode and showing a large and strongly variable magnetic field, could be wrongly modelled in terms of an oblique rotator with abundance spots.
The magnetic field variability of Bp stars is generally interpreted in terms of the oblique rotator model.
However, the cases of HD\,96446 and HD\,37151 suggest that pulsation might also be the cause for magnetic field variability.
Clearly, additional magnetic field measurements of SPB stars are needed in order to search for possible relations between the magnetic and pulsation variability and between the field strength and the amplitudes of the pulsation modes. The failure to find multiperiodic signals in Bp stars indicate that in B-type stars very strong magnetic fields are not coexistent with oscillations, or stars with stronger magnetic fields have much lower pulsation amplitudes.
Both Bp and SPB stars are slow rotators.
A slow rotation rate is consequently not the only condition for a star to become chemically peculiar.
As already suggested by Michaud\ (\cite{michaud}), the magnetic field stabilizes the atmosphere,
permitting diffusion processes to become important.
The magnetic field strength is very likely an important factor in explaining why some stars
are chemically peculiar while others are not. Besides, one may suspect that pulsations of the SPB kind tend to inhibit radiative diffusion, which would explain why SPB stars are not chemically peculiar in spite of the small magnetic field they sometimes exhibit. We finally point out that the strongest magnetic fields appear in young Bp stars, indicating a magnetic field decay in main-sequence stars at advanced ages.
The evolutionary state of magnetic chemically peculiar stars has already been studied
by several authors in the literature with the aim to better understand the origin of magnetic fields in Ap/Bp stars (e.g., Hubrig et al.\ \cite{hubrig1,hubrig5}).
Recently, Kochukhov \& Bagnulo\ (\cite{kochukhov}) found that magnetic stars with $M > 3M_\odot$ are homogeneously distributed along the main sequence.
Our study based on a smaller, yet carefully selected, sample of stars,
showed that the majority of Bp stars are rather young stars with a location close to the zero-age main sequence (ZAMS).
In any case, the observation of young magnetic stars is in favour of the fossil theory.
Direct confirmation of the presence of magnetic fields in the pre-main sequence phase was
recently provided by the discovery of magnetic fields in Herbig Ae/Be stars (Hubrig et al.\ \cite{hubrig6,hubrig7,hubrig8}, Wade et al.\ \cite{wade}),
which are considered as the progenitors of main sequence early-type stars.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 7,884 |
Q: Migrate mysql to postgres using pgloader I'm trying to migrate mysql to postgres using pgloader, since I'm using window so, I installed pgloader in
windows linux subsystem, and I have used following command to migrate the DB
pgloader mysql://root@localhost/f1db pgsql://postgres@localhost:5433/f1db
KABOOM!
FATAL error: Failed to connect to pgsql at "localhost" (port 5433) as user "postgres": Server requested md5-password authentication, but no password was given.
An unhandled error condition has been signalled:
Failed to connect to pgsql at "localhost" (port 5433) as user "postgres": Server requested md5-password authentication, but no password was given.
What I am doing here?
Failed to connect to pgsql at "localhost" (port 5433) as user "postgres": Server requested md5-password authentication, but no password was given.
Waiting for the monitor thread to complete.
Please tell that how to pass password for both MYsql and Postgres in the command line and if I have @ in my password how to use it in the command because we already have user@localhost in the command.
A: From pgloader Reference Manual (https://pgloader.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pgloader.html):
command line:
pgloader SOURCE TARGET
Source Connection String
db://user:pass@host:port/dbname
Where db might be of sqlite, mysql or mssql.
Connection String
The parameter is expected to be given as a Connection URI as documented in the PostgreSQL documentation at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/libpq-connect.html#LIBPQ-CONNSTRING.
postgresql://[user[:password]@][netloc][:port][/dbname][?option=value&...]
user
Can contain any character, including colon (:) which must then be doubled (::) and at-sign (@) which must then be doubled (@@).
When omitted, the user name defaults to the value of the PGUSER environment variable, and if it is unset, the value of the USER environment variable.
password
Can contain any character, including the at sign (@) which must then be doubled (@@). To leave the password empty, when the user name ends with at at sign, you then have to use the syntax user:@.
When omitted, the password defaults to the value of the PGPASSWORD environment variable if it is set, otherwise the password is left unset.
When no password is found either in the connection URI nor in the environment, then pgloader looks for a .pgpass file as documented at https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/libpq-pgpass.html
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 9,030 |
The Hungarian Black Pepper is a rare & colorful hungarian heirloom Chile, originating in the city of Kiskenfelegyhaza in modern day Hungary. Unique, black-colored fruits are the shape of a Jalapeño.
They are mildly hot and have a delicious flavor. The tall plants have beautiful purple flowers that make this variety very ornamental. The pods are about the same size as a Jalapeño and ripen from very dark purple to red in approximately 70 days.
CULINARY USE: These peppers are good for salads or salsa, when some color is desired but not too much heat. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 31 |
Central Valley Transfer Project
PIO/Communicators Committee
Regional Data Dashboard
Tag Archive for: Post-secondary
CVHEC eyes recommendations by state equity taskforce for implementation
Post-secondary systems seeking to emerge from the pandemic stronger and better able to help all learners thrive can look to a new report by California's Recovery with Equity Taskforce that provides recommendations the Central Valley Higher Education Consortium will explore during an upcoming Higher Education Fall 2021 Summit Series.
Recovery with Equity: A Roadmap for Higher Education After the Pandemic, submitted recently to Governor Gavin Newsom and the Governor's Council for Post-Secondary Education, includes a series of interconnected, interdependent recommendations developed by the state taskforce to help post-secondary systems.
Dr. Lande Ajose, who chairs the Governor's Council for Post-Secondary Education and created the taskforce, said, "Student success in higher education is critical to the health of our state and regional economies. We need to ensure that California's systems of higher learning fully recover from the pandemic and thrive, while keeping students our number one priority. Their success is inextricably tied to the future of California."
The report's 11 recommendations are organized to advance four guiding principles: Fostering Inclusive Institutions, Streamlining Pathways to Degrees, Facilitating Student Transitions and Simplifying Supports for Student Stability.
It concludes with actions that leaders in California can pursue to support California's post-secondary institutions recover from the pandemic more equitable and resilient than before, and more aligned with the economic needs of the state.
Dr. Benjamin Duran, CVHEC executive director, said the consortium, which consists of the leaders of 29 colleges in the nine-county Central Valley region, will review the recommendations and begin collaborating for implementation.
"We look forward to sharing out the Central Valley's equity, dual enrollment and transfer efforts and aligning them with the Recovery with Equity recommendations," Duran said. (See the story in this issue about the CVHEC Equity, Race, and Social Justice Taskforce).
Read the full story and report recommendations.
https://cvhec.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/CVHEC_logo_315.png 0 0 Pablo https://cvhec.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/CVHEC_logo_315.png Pablo2021-03-11 16:46:492021-03-11 16:46:49CVHEC eyes recommendations by state equity taskforce for implementation
WHAT THE CV-HEC IS HAPPENING GUEST BLOG (January 2023): Master's UpskillJanuary 24, 2023 - 1:22 pm
BOARD NEWS: CVHEC Board Reviews AB928, Eyes Retreat In 2023 and Bids Farewell to One of Its Own (Photo Gallery)December 14, 2022 - 9:44 am
WHAT THE CV-HEC IS HAPPENING BLOG (December 2022): Year-In-Review/Silver EditionDecember 14, 2022 - 9:23 am
WHAT THE CV-HEC IS HAPPENING BLOG (November 2022): The Master's Upskilling ProgramNovember 18, 2022 - 9:40 am
CVHEC Board of Directors NewsNovember 18, 2022 - 1:18 am
centralvalleyhec@gmail.com | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 1,482 |
Q: C# Building Json string, but I'm getting the error "Invalid anonymous type member declarator" I'm trying to create a Json string like this:
{
"StreetLines": [
"101 Test St",
"Ste 100"
],
"City": "Dallas",
"StateOrProvinceCode": "TX",
"PostalCode": "75999",
"CountryCode": "US"
}
This is my code:
var json = new
{
StreetLines = new
{
toAddress1,
toAddress2
},
new
{
City = toCity,
StateOrProvinceCode = toState,
PostalCode = toZip,
CountryCode = toCountry
}
};
I'm getting the error "Invalid anonymous type member declarator" for the lower part. I'm not sure what the issue is, any advice would be appreciated.
A: First, note that StreetLines is a JSON array, so you should use a C# array or list:
StreetLines = new[] // notice the "[]"
{
toAddress1,
toAddress2
},
In your JSON, the keys City, StateOrProvinceCode and so on are in the same object as StreetLines, so in your C# code you should not create a new anonymous class for them.
If the JSON were like this:
{
"StreetLines": [
"101 Test St",
"Ste 100"
],
"OtherPartsOfTheAddress": {
"City": "Dallas",
"StateOrProvinceCode": "TX",
"PostalCode": "75999",
"CountryCode": "US"
}
}
Then you can write
var json = new
{
StreetLines = new[]
{
toAddress1,
toAddress2
},
OtherPartsOfTheAddress = new // notice the key name
{
City = toCity,
StateOrProvinceCode = toState,
PostalCode = toZip,
CountryCode = toCountry
}
};
But since there is no OtherPartsOfTheAddress, you just need to do:
var json = new
{
StreetLines = new[]
{
toAddress1,
toAddress2
},
City = toCity,
StateOrProvinceCode = toState,
PostalCode = toZip,
CountryCode = toCountry
};
A: Your code should look like this,
var json = new
{
StreetLines = new List<string>
{
toAddress1,
toAddress2
},
City = toCity,
StateOrProvinceCode = toState,
PostalCode = toZip,
CountryCode = toCountry
}
StreetLines is a collection of strings and City, Sate, postal etc are part of the main json.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 7,976 |
Panimerus är ett släkte av tvåvingar. Panimerus ingår i familjen fjärilsmyggor.
Kladogram enligt Catalogue of Life:
Källor
Fjärilsmyggor
Panimerus | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 764 |
Seasonally inspired brown polka dot Wedding invitations with your details printed in orange and brown inside a white circle outlined in orange, over a brown and white polka dot pattern. These invitations are stylish and preppy, and are perfect for modern Autumn wedding events. The couple's name and wedding date are printed in orange, while the remaining details are printed in brown. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 5,438 |
Bogdan Marjanović (Serbian Cyrillic: Богдан Марјановић; born 3 November 1980) is a Serbian footballer.
Career
Marjanović previously played for FK Zvezdara and FK Jagodina in the Serbian SuperLiga, beside having represented some lower league clubs as FK Srem, FK Morava Ćuprija, FK Jedinstvo Donja Mutnica and FK Jedinstvo Paraćin. Before coming to FK Napredak Kruševac he played in Montenegrin First League club FK Mornar.
References
Profile and 2009-10 stats at Montenegrin Federation site.
1980 births
Living people
People from Ćuprija
Serbian footballers
Serbian expatriate footballers
FK Zvezdara players
FK Srem players
FK Jagodina players
FK Napredak Kruševac players
Serbian SuperLiga players
Association football defenders | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 9,452 |
\section{Introduction}
Training modern deep neural networks (DNNs) often requires extensive tuning, and many seminal architectures have been developed through a hand-design process that requires extensive expertise \cite{lecun2015deep,NIPS2012_4824, bahdanau2014neural, mnih2015human}. To make this process easier and more productive, automated methods for metalearning and optimization of DNN hyperparameters and architectures have recently been developed, using techniques such as Bayesian optimization, reinforcement learning, and evolutionary search \cite{snoek2015scalable, zoph2016neural, miikkulainen2019evolving}. At the same time, regularization during training has become an important area of research, as preventing overfitting has been identified as crucial to the generalization capabilities of DNNs \cite{srivastava2014dropout, kukavcka2017regularization}. An interesting opportunity is therefore emerging: Using metalearning to discover improved regularization mechanisms \cite{cubuk2018autoaugment, balaji2018metareg, real2019regularized}.
One promising such approach is evolution of loss functions. Instead of optimizing network structure or weights, evolution is used to modify the gradients, making it possible to automatically regularize the learning process \cite{houthooft2018evolved, gonzalez2019glo}. However, as in most of the earlier metalearning methods, evolution serves as an outer loop to network training. Such an approach is computationally prohibitive since fitness evaluations in principle need full training of DNNs. Also, the approach cannot adapt loss functions to different stages of learning.
Population-Based Training (PBT) was recently proposed to overcome this limitation in metalearning \cite{jaderberg2017population}. PBT interleaves DNN weight training with the optimization of hyperparameters that are relevant to the training process but also have no particular fixed value (e.g., learning rate). Such online adaptation is crucial in domains where the learning dynamics are non-stationary. Therefore, PBT forms a promising starting point for making loss-function optimization practical as well.
Building on PBT, this paper develops \textit{Evolutionary Population-Based Training} (EPBT) as such an approach through four extensions. First, powerful heuristics from evolutionary black-box optimization are employed to discover promising combinations of hyperparameters for DNN training. In particular, EPBT uses selection, mutation, and crossover operators adapted from genetic algorithms \cite{whitley1994genetic} to find good solutions.
Second, a recently developed loss function parameterization based on multivariate Taylor expansions called \textit{TaylorGLO} \cite{gonzalez2020taylorglo} is combined with EPBT to optimize loss functions. This parameterization makes it possible to encode many different loss functions compactly and works on a variety of DNN architectures. In prior work, it was found to discover loss functions that result in faster training and better convergence than the standard cross-entropy loss.
Third, an interesting challenge emerges when both loss functions and the weights are adapted at the same time: The problem becomes inherently deceptive. Configurations that allow for fast learning in the beginning are often bad for fine tuning at the end of training. To overcome this problem, EPBT makes use of Novelty Pulsation \cite{shahrzad2018noveltyselection, shahrzad2020noveltypulsation}, a powerful heuristic for maintaining population diversity and escaping from deceptive traps during optimization.
Fourth, another challenge with the coadaptation is that training is noisy and can overfit to the validation dataset during evolution. EPBT thus introduces a new variant of knowledge distillation \cite{hinton2015distilling} called Population-Based Distillation. This method stabilizes training, helps reduce evaluation noise, and thus allows evolution to make more reliable progress.
Experiments on the CIFAR-10 and SVHN image classification benchmarks with several network architectures show that EPBT results in faster, more accurate learning. An analysis of the shapes of the discovered loss functions suggests that they penalize overfitting, thus regularizing the learning process automatically. Different loss shapes are most effective at different stages of the training process, suggesting that an adaptive loss functions perform better than one that remains static throughout the training, thus taking advantage of the synergy between learning and evolution.
\section{Background and Related Work}
This section summarizes relevant work in metalearning and regularization of DNNs, especially through population-based methods. Previous work on loss function optimization and novelty pulsation is also reviewed.
\subsection{Metalearning}
Metalearning of good DNN hyperparameters and architectures is a highly active field of research. One popular approach is to use reinforcement learning to tune a controller that generates the designs \cite{zoph2016neural, zoph2018learning, pham2018efficient}. Another approach is to make the metalearning differentiable to the performance of the DNN, and then learn by gradient descent \cite{maclaurin2015gradient, liu2018darts}.
Recently, metalearning methods based on evolutionary algorithms (EA) have also gained popularity. These methods can optimize DNNs of arbitrary topology and structure \cite{miikkulainen2019evolving}, achieving state-of-the-art results e.g.\ on large-scale image classification benchmarks \cite{real2019regularized}, and demonstrating good trade-offs in multiple objectives such as performance and network complexity \cite{lu2018nsga}. Many of these EAs use proven and time-tested heuristics such as mutation, crossover, selection, and elitism \cite{goldberg1988genetic, whitley1994genetic, nature_neuroevolution} to perform black-box optimization on arbitrary complex objectives. Advanced EAs such as CMA-ES \cite{hansen1996cmaes} have also optimized DNN hyperparameters successfully in high-dimensional search spaces \cite{loshchilov2016cma} and are competitive with statistical hyperparameter tuning methods such as Bayesian optimization \cite{snoek2012practical, snoek2015scalable, klein2017fast}.
\subsection{Population-based Training}
One challenge shared by every DNN metalearning algorithm is deciding the right amount of training required to evaluate a network architecture and hyperparameter configuration on a benchmark task. Many algorithms simply stop training prematurely, assuming that the partially trained performance is correlated with the true performance \cite{li2017hyperband, miikkulainen2019evolving}. Other methods rely on weight sharing, where many candidate architectures share model layers \cite{pham2018efficient}, thus ensuring that the training time is amortized among all solutions being evaluated.
PBT \cite{jaderberg2017population} uses the weight sharing approach, which is more computationally efficient. PBT works by alternating between training models in parallel and tuning the model's hyperparameters through an exploit-and-explore strategy. During exploitation, the hyperparameters and weights of well-performing models are duplicated to replace the worst performing ones. During exploration, hyperparameters are randomly perturbed within a constrained search space. Because PBT never retrains models from scratch, its computational complexity scales only with the population size and not with the total number of hyperparameter configurations searched. Besides tuning training hyperparameters such as the learning rate, PBT has successfully discovered data augmentation schedules \cite{ho2019population}. Therefore, PBT serves as a promising basis for the design of EPBT.
\subsection{Regularization of DNNs}
While metalearning seeks to find good DNN architectures, regularization is concerned about preventing DNNs from overfitting during training or optimization. Besides classic penalty-based approaches such as weight decay \cite{moody1995simple}, there are methods that leverage the structure of DNN layers. One simple but popular approach is dropout \cite{srivastava2014dropout}, which randomly sets the outputs of a layer to zero. This approach helps prevent overfitting by forcing subsequent layers to adapt to the noise generated by the previous layers. A related technique is batch normalization \cite{ioffe2015batch}, which normalizes the outputs of layers and prevents exploding gradients. These approaches work universally on all most all DNN architectures and problem domains and can even be combined.
Recently, much attention has been focused on manipulating training data to help regularize network training. Advanced data augmentation techniques such as cutout \cite{devries2017improved}, and cutmix \cite{yun2019cutmix} purposely create more diverse distributions of the input data to improve generalization and avoid overfitting. Similarly, adversarial examples \cite{goodfellow2014explaining} are another way to regularize by training the network with inputs that are particularly difficult for it to get right. Techniques such as label smoothing \cite{muller2019does} and knowledge distillation/self-distillation \cite{hinton2015distilling, kim2020self} soften the training targets to ensure more properly behaved gradients, resulting in better generalization. Along the same lines, loss-function optimization is an alternative method to achieve better regularization through modification of gradients, as will be reviewed next.
\subsection{Loss Function Optimization}
DNNs are trained through the backpropagation of gradients that originate from a loss function \cite{lecun2015deep}. Loss functions represent the primary training objective for a neural network. The choice of the loss function can have a significant impact on a network's performance \cite{janocha2017loss, bosman2019visualising, gonzalez2019glo}. Recently, Genetic Loss Optimization (GLO) \cite{gonzalez2019glo} was proposed as a new kind of metalearning, making it possible to automatically discover novel loss functions that can be used to train higher-accuracy neural networks in less time.
In GLO, loss functions are represented as trees and optimized through genetic programming \cite{banzhaf1998genetic}. This approach has the advantage of allowing arbitrarily complex loss functions. However, there are pathological functions in this search space with undesirable behaviors, such as discontinuities. To avoid these issues, this paper uses a loss-function representation based on multivariate Taylor expansions \cite{gonzalez2020taylorglo}. TaylorGLO parameterization is smoother, has guaranteed continuity and adjustable complexity, and is easier to implement. How these loss functions are optimized with EPBT is described in the next section.
\subsection{Novelty Selection and Pulsation}
\label{sc:noveltyselection}
Novelty Selection is a form of novelty search that augments the original fitness-based selection with novelty and thus improves the quality-diversity of the population \cite{lehman2008exploiting, shahrzad2018noveltyselection}. Novelty is measured through a behavioral description of the individuals, i.e.\ a phenotypical feature vector that is not related to fitness. An initial set of $m$ elite candidates is first selected based on fitness and sorted according to their novelty score $S_i$, measured as the sum of pairwise distances $d$ of the individual's behavior vector $b_i$ to those of all other individuals $j$ in the set:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq-NoveltyScore}
S_{i} = \sum_{j = 1}^{m}d(b_{i},\ b_{j})\; .
\end{equation}
The top $k$ candidates from this set are selected as elites, skipping candidates that represent the same cluster.
In principle, fitness-based selection is more greedy than novelty selection, and could result in faster convergence. On the other hand, novelty selection explores more diverse candidates, which could help discover better regularization. In Novelty Pulsation \cite{shahrzad2020noveltypulsation}, such exploitation and exploration are both leveraged by switching Novelty Selection on and off for every $p$ generations, resulting in faster convergence and more reliable solutions. Novelty Pulsation plays an important role in keeping the population diverse enough to avoid deceptive interactions between weight and loss-function adaptation in EPBT. Furthermore, unlike other novelty-based methods such as Map Elites \cite{mouret2015illuminating}, Novelty Pulsation can be easily integrated with EPBT due to the simplicity of the algorithm and lack of computational overhead from maintaining an archive of individuals.
\section{The EBPT Method}\label{sec:epbt}
This section describes in detail how EPBT implements regularization metalearning. EPBT utilizes genetic operators from black-box optimization to enhance hyperparameter metalearning in PBT, and combines it with loss-function metalearning. Their deceptive and overfitting interactions are mitigated through a selection heuristic based on quality-diversity, and through knowledge distillation.
\subsection{Overview}
\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{EPBT/images/EPBT_overview.pdf}
\caption{An overview of the EPBT evolutionary loop. EPBT begins by randomly initializing individuals, which are composed of hyperparameters, model weights, and fitness values. Next, EPBT runs for multiple generations in a three-step loop: (1) selection of the best individuals, (2) generation of new individuals, and (3) evaluation of these individuals. In Step 1, promising individuals are selected using a heuristic. In Step 2, new individuals with updated hyperparameters are created, but the weights and fitness are inherited. In Step 3, these individuals are evaluated on a task and have their model weights and fitness (i.e., performance in the task) updated. Thus, EPBT makes it possible to simultaneously train the network and evolve loss function parameterizations.}
\label{fig:epbt}
\end{center}
\vspace*{-2ex}
\end{figure}
The core concept of EPBT is intuitive and builds on extensive work already done with evolutionary optimization of DNNs \cite{nature_neuroevolution}. Figure~\ref{fig:epbt} shows how EPBT maximizes the fitness of a population of candidate solutions (individuals) over multiple iterations (generations). As a black-box method, EPBT requires no gradient information but only the fitness value of each individual. With EPBT, it is thus possible to apply metalearning to tasks where meta-gradients are not available.
At the beginning of generation $g$, the population $\mathbb{M}_g$ consists of individuals $M_{gi}$. Each $M_{gi} = \{\mathbf{D}_{gi}, \mathbf{h}_{gi}, f_{gi}\}$ where $\mathbf{D}_{gi}$ is a DNN model (defined as the weights of an user-specified architecture), $\mathbf{h}_{gi}$ is a set of hyperparameters, and $f_{gi}$ is a real-valued scalar fitness. In the Step 1 of the generation, $f_{gi}$ is used to select promising individuals $\hat{M}_{gi}$ to form a parent set $\mathbb{\hat{M}}_g$, where $\mathbb{\hat{M}}_g \subset \mathbb{M}_g$. In the Step 2, $\mathbb{\hat{M}}_g$ is used to create a set $\mathbb{N}_g$, which contains new individuals $N_{gi}$. Each of these new individuals inherits $\mathbf{D}_{gi}$ unchanged from its parent $\hat{M}_{gi}$, but with modified hyperparameters $\mathbf{\hat{h}}_{gi}$. The genetic operators used for generating $\mathbb{N}_g$ will be described in more detail in the next subsection. Finally, in Step 3, each $N_{gi}$ is evaluated by training $\mathbf{D}_{gi}$ on a task or dataset, thereby creating a model with updated weights $\mathbf{\hat{D}}_{gi}$. The validation performance of $\mathbf{\hat{D}}_{gi}$ is used to determine a new fitness value $\hat{f}_{gi}$. Thus, by the end of generation $g$, the population pool contains the evaluated individuals $\hat{N}_{gi} \in \mathbb{\hat{N}}_g$, where $\hat{N}_{gi} = \{\mathbf{\hat{D}}_{gi}, \mathbf{\hat{h}}_{gi}, \hat{f}_{gi}\}$. This process is repeated for multiple generations until the fitness of the best individual in the population converges.
Within the core metalearning evolutionary loop, EPBT contains several other components. They include: (1) A collection of genetic operators specifically chosen for the task of hyperparameter optimization. (2) The Novelty Selection and Pulsation search heuristic that improves population diversity by preserving the most novel elites. (3) A TaylorGLO representation of loss functions with parameters that EPBT can optimize. (4) Population-Based Distillation method (PBD) that uses the best model in the population to help train other networks. Each of these components will be described in more detail below.
Note that since the evaluation of an individual does not depend on other individuals, the entire EPBT process can be parallelized. In the current implementation of EPBT, fitness evaluations are mapped onto a multi-process pool of workers on a single machine. Each worker has access to a particular GPU of the machine, and if there are multiple GPUs available, every GPU will be assigned to at least one worker. For the experiments in this paper, a single worker does not fully utilize the GPU and multiple workers can be trained in parallel without any slowdown.
\subsection{Genetic Operators}
EPBT uses standard evolutionary black-box optimization operators \cite{whitley1994genetic} to tune individuals. This subsection details how EPBT is initialized and how these operators are utilized through the three septs of each generation, with a summary in Algorithm~\ref{alg:epbt}.
\begin{algorithm}[t]
\caption{EPBT}
\label{alg:epbt}
\begin{algorithmic}
\STATE {\bfseries Input:} max generations $n$, initial population $\mathbb{M}_0$, genetic operators $\tau, \gamma, \xi$
\FOR{$g=0$ {\bfseries to} $n-1$}
\STATE 1. Select $\hat{M}_{gi} = \{\mathbf{D}_{gi}, \mathbf{h}_{gi}, f_{gi}\}$ using $\tau$
\STATE 2a. Set $\mathbf{\hat{h}}_{gi} = \xi(\gamma(\mathbf{h}_{gi})))$
\STATE 2b. Set $N_{gi} = \{\mathbf{D}_{gi}, \mathbf{\hat{h}}_{gi}\}$
\STATE 3a. Evaluate $\mathbb{N}_g$, set $\hat{N}_{gi} = \{\mathbf{\hat{D}}_{gi}, \mathbf{\hat{h}}_{gi}, \hat{f}_{gi}\}$
\STATE 3b. Set $\mathbb{\dot{M}}_g$ to top $k$ $M_{gi}$ from $\mathbb{M}_g$
\STATE 3c. Set $\mathbb{M}_{g+1} = \mathbb{\hat{N}}_g \cup \mathbb{\dot{M}}_g$
\ENDFOR
\end{algorithmic}
\end{algorithm}
\textbf{Initialization:} A population with $P$ individuals is created as $\mathbb{M}_0$. For each $M_{0i} \in \mathbb{M}_0$, $\mathbf{D}_{0i}$ is set to a fixed DNN architecture and its weights are randomly initialized. Also, each variable in $\mathbf{h}_{0i}$ is uniformly sampled from within a fixed range and $f_{0i}$ is set to zero.
\textbf{Step 1 -- Tournament Selection:} Using the tournament selection operator $\tau$, $t$ individuals are repeatedly chosen at random from $\mathbb{M}_g$. Each time, the individuals are compared and the one with the highest fitness is added to $\mathbb{\hat{M}}_g$. This process is repeated until $|\mathbb{\hat{M}}_g| = |\mathbb{M}_g| - k$, where $k$ is the number of elites. The value $t=2$ is commonly used in EA literature and in the experiments in this paper also.
\textbf{Step 2 -- Mutation and Crossover:} For each $\hat{M}_{gi}$, a uniform mutation operator $\gamma$ is applied by introducing multiplicative Gaussian noise independently to each variable in $\mathbf{h}_{gi}$. The mutation operator can randomly and independently reinitialize every variable as well. This approach allows for the exploration of novel combinations of hyperparameters. After mutation, a uniform crossover operator $\xi$ is applied, where each variable in $\mathbf{h}_{gi}$ is randomly swapped (50\% probability) with the same variable from another individual in $\mathbb{\hat{M}}_g$, resulting in the creation of $\mathbf{\hat{h}}_{gi}$. $\mathbf{D}_{gi}$ is copied from $\hat{M}_{gi}$ and combined with $\mathbf{\hat{h}}_{gi}$ to form the unevaluated individual $N_{gi}$.
\textbf{Step 3 -- Fitness Evaluation with Elitism:} The evaluation process proceeds as described above and results in evaluated individuals $\mathbb{\hat{N}}_g$. After evaluation, EPBT uses an elitism heuristic to preserve progress. In elitism without any Novelty Selection, $\mathbb{M}_g$ is sorted by $f_{gi}$ and the best $k$ performing individuals $\mathbb{\dot{M}}_g \subset \mathbb{M}_g$ are preserved and combined with $\mathbb{\hat{N}}_g$ to form $\mathbb{M}_{g+1}$, the population for the next generation. With Novelty Selection, the $k$ individuals are selected based on a combination of fitness and novelty, as was described in Section~\ref{sc:noveltyselection}. By default, $k$ is set to half of the population size, which is a popular value in literature. In the same way that mutation and crossover encourage exploration of a search space, elitism allows for the exploitation of promising regions in the search space.
\subsection{Loss Function Parameterization}
Loss functions are represented by leveraging the TaylorGLO parameterization. This parameterization is defined as a fixed set of continuous values, in contrast to the original GLO parameterization based on trees \cite{gonzalez2019glo}. TaylorGLO loss functions have several functional advantages over GLO: they are inherently more stable, smooth, and lack discontinuities \cite{gonzalez2020taylorglo}. Furthermore, because of their simple and compact representation as a continuous vector, TaylorGLO functions can be easily tuned using black-box methods. Specifically in this paper, a third-order TaylorGLO loss function with parameters $\theta_0 \ldots \theta_7$, is used:
\newcommand{\Tx}[1][-\theta_0]{(y_i #1)}
\newcommand{\Ty}[1][-\theta_1]{(\hat{y}_i #1)}
\begin{equation}
\scriptsize
\label{eq:k3taylorglo}
\begin{aligned}
\mathcal{L}(y,\hat{y}) = -\frac{1}{n}\sum^n_{i=1} \Big[ \theta_2\Ty + \frac{1}{2}\theta_3\Ty^2 + \frac{1}{6}\theta_4\Ty^3 + \\
+ \theta_5\Tx\Ty + \frac{1}{2}\theta_6\Tx\Ty^2 + \frac{1}{2}\theta_7\Tx^2\Ty \Big] \;,
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
where $y$ is the sample's true label in one-hot form, and $\hat{y}$ is the network's prediction (i.e., scaled logits). The eight parameters ($\theta_0 \ldots \theta_7$) are stored in $\mathbf{h}_{gi}$ and optimized using EPBT.
\subsection{Novelty Selection and Pulsation}
Novelty Pulsation works by turning Novelty Selection on and off at each pulsation cycle interval $p$, changing how elite individuals are chosen during Step 3. When Novelty Selection is on, $\mathbb{M}_g$ is first increased to include the most fit $m>k$ candidates, and then filtered down to $k$ most novel elites as described in Section~\ref{sc:noveltyselection}. For the experiments in this paper, the behavior metric used to compute novelty is a binary vector indicating whether the candidate correctly predicts the classes of a randomly chosen $N$-sized subset of the validation data. This behavior metric encourages evolution to discover models that can perform well generally and not just overfit to a few classes in particular. Preliminary experiments showed that setting $m = 3/2 k$, $N=400$, and $p=5$ works well and helps protect against premature convergence.
\subsection{Population-Based Distillation}
To avoid overfitting during evolution, model evaluation includes a variant of knowledge distillation \cite{hinton2015distilling}. The main idea in knowledge distillation is to construct training targets as a linear combination of sample labels and the predictions of a better performing teacher model. A model from the previous epoch can be used as a teacher, resulting in a strong regularizing effect \cite{kim2020self}. Thus, in PBD, the loss for an individual's model $\mathbf{D}_{gi}$ is computed as
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:pbd}
\mathcal{L}(y,\hat{y}) = \mathcal{L}(\hat{\alpha} * \hat{y}_p + (1 - \hat{\alpha}) * y, \hat{y}),
\end{equation}
where $\hat{y}_p$ are the predictions of the best individual in the previous generation. $\hat{\alpha} = \alpha * (t/T)$ where $t$ is the number of training epochs elapsed, $T$ the total number of training epochs, and $\alpha$ is a scalar between 0 and 1. As in prior work \cite{kim2020self}, to minimize the effect of inaccurate teacher models in the beginning, $\hat{\alpha}$ is initialized at zero and then increased linearly with the number of training epochs. Thus, PBD regularizes against overfitting to the validation dataset by smoothing the target labels and making for better-behaved gradients, allowing evolution to proceed more reliably.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{EPBT/images/resnet_z.pdf}\\
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{EPBT/images/resnet.pdf}
\caption{Experiments on CIFAR-10 with ResNet-32. Each line represents the test classification accuracy ($y$-axis) of the method over the number of epochs of training ($x$-axis). All results are averaged over five runs with error bars shown. The top plot is a zoomed-in version of the bottom plot. EPBT outperforms all baselines by a significant margin.}
\label{fig:cifar10_res}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure*}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.24\linewidth]{EPBT/images/wrn_10_12_z.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=0.24\linewidth]{EPBT/images/wrn_16_8_z.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=0.24\linewidth]{EPBT/images/wrn_22_6_z.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=0.24\linewidth]{EPBT/images/wrn_28_5_z.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=0.24\linewidth]{EPBT/images/wrn_10_12.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=0.24\linewidth]{EPBT/images/wrn_16_8.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=0.24\linewidth]{EPBT/images/wrn_22_6.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=0.24\linewidth]{EPBT/images/wrn_28_5.pdf}
\caption{Experiments on CIFAR-10 with WRN-10-12, WRN-16-8, WRN-22-6, and WRN-28-5 (left to right). All results are averaged over five runs with error bars shown. The top plot is a zoomed-in version of the bottom plot. EPBT outperforms the baselines for all each of the architectures.}
\label{fig:cifar10_wide}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{EPBT/images/svhn_z.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{EPBT/images/svhn.pdf}
\caption{Experiments on SVHN with ResNet-32. All results are averaged over five runs with error bars shown. The top plot is a zoomed-in version of the bottom plot. EPBT outperforms the baseline, which uses cross-entropy loss to train.}
\label{fig:svhn_res}
\end{figure}
\section{Experimental Results}
To show the effectiveness of EPBT, the algorithm was applied to optimize loss functions for two popular image classification datasets: CIFAR-10 and SVHN. Experimental results and comparisons to multiple baselines are presented below.
\subsection{CIFAR-10}
CIFAR-10 \cite{krizhevsky2009learning} is a widely used image classification dataset consisting of 60,000 natural images in ten classes. The dataset is composed of a training set of 50,000 images and a test set of 10,000 images. For evaluating individuals in EPBT, the training set was split into a separate validation set of 1,250 images and smaller training set with 48,750 images. To control noise during evaluations, the validation dataset was artificially enlarged to 25,000 images through data augmentation. The fitness was calculated by finding the classification accuracy of the trained model on this set. The test accuracies of each individual's model after evaluation were also recorded for comparison purposes only.
To understand the improvements brought about by EPBT, two baselines were created. The first baseline is a model trained without EPBT: a 32-layer residual network (ResNet-32) with 0.47 million weights that was initialized with the He method \cite{he2015delving, resnet}. The model was trained using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for 200 epochs on all 50,000 training images with a batch size of 128, momentum of 0.9, and cross-entropy loss. A fixed learning rate schedule that starts at 0.1 and decays by a factor of 5 at 60, 120, and 160 epochs was used. Input images were normalized to have unit pixel variance and a mean pixel value of zero before training while data augmentation techniques such as random flips, translations, and cutout \cite{devries2017improved} were applied during training.
The second baseline is a reimplementation of the original PBT algorithm that was used to optimize DNNs on the CIFAR-10 dataset \cite{jaderberg2017population}. The training setup was similar to the first baseline but with learning rate as an evolvable hyperparameter. Unlike EPBT, PBT only makes uses of truncation selection, where the weights and loss parameters from the top 25\% of the population were copied over to the bottom 25\% every generation, and simple mutation, where the hyperparameters were tuned using a mixture of both random resets and multiplicative perturbations of magnitude 1.2. PBT was run for 25 generations, each with eight epochs of training (for a total of 200 epochs), and with a population size of 40. The learning rate was randomly initialized between 0.1 and 0.0001.
The experiments with EPBT were run using a similar training setup as described above. Like the PBT baselines, EPBT was run for 25 generations of eight epochs each and with a population size of 40. Besides the TaylorGLO loss function parameterization, EPBT optimized the hyperparameters for SGD learning rate schedule and momentum as well. The learning rate schedule was based on the one used by the first baseline but with a tunable scaling and decay factor. This search space allows for the exploration of novel schedules but can rediscover the original schedule if necessary. EPBT was configured similarly as the PBT baseline, but with an elitism size of $k=20$ and with the initial TaylorGLO parameters sampled uniformly between $-10$ and $10$.
\begin{table*}[t]
\begin{center}
\begin{footnotesize}
\begin{sc}
\begin{tabular}{lcccccc}
\toprule
Algorithm & CIFAR-10, ResNet-32 & CIFAR-10, WRN-10-12 & CIFAR-10, WRN-16-8 & CIFAR-10, WRN-22-6 & CIFAR-10, WRN-28-5 & SVHN, ResNet-32 \\
\midrule
Baseline 1 (no PBT) & 92.42 (0.21) & 94.18 (0.09) & 95.66 (0.13) & 95.87 (0.18) & 95.95 (0.07) & 97.81 (0.04) \\
Baseline 2 (PBT) & 91.53 (0.56) & -- & -- & -- & -- & -- \\
\midrule
EPBT & \textbf{92.79 (0.15)} & \textbf{94.38 (0.14)} & \textbf{95.79 (0.08)} & \textbf{96.05 (0.09)} & \textbf{96.02 (0.12)} & \textbf{98.08 (0.08)} \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{sc}
\end{footnotesize}
\end{center}
\vskip 0.15in
\caption{Mean and standard deviation (over five runs) of final test accuracies on the CIFAR-10 and SVHN datasets. EPBT achieves better results (bold) compared to the baselines. Results are reported in percentage.}
\label{table:epbt_results}
\vspace*{-3ex}
\end{table*}
The test accuracies of each baseline and best model in EPBT's population, averaged over five independent runs with standard error, are shown in Figure~\ref{fig:cifar10_res}. EPBT converges rapidly to the highest test accuracy and outperforms all other baselines. Baseline 2 (PBT) results in the worst performance, followed by the Baseline 1, which does not use a population at all. The relatively poor performance of PBT might be because it does not explicitly optimize for learning rate schedules. Previous work has shown that decaying the learning rate at crucial moments during training is important \cite{you2019does}. On the other hand, EPBT's more advanced parameterization and Novelty Pulsation heuristic allows for more principled, yet diverse learning rate schedules to be discovered.
EPBT can also be scaled up to larger DNN architectures with more weights. In Figure~\ref{fig:cifar10_wide}, Baseline 1 and EPBT were used to train four different wide residual networks \cite{zagoruyko2016wide} with different number of layers, but with similar number of parameters (11 million). The four architectures, in order of increasing depth, are: WRN-10-12, WRN-16-8, WRN-22-6, and WRN-28-5. EPBT is able to achieve noticeable improvements over Baseline 1 for all of the networks, reaching a better test accuracy at a faster pace. However, the final performance difference between the baseline and EPBT does decrease as the architecture becomes more complicated. Recent work has shown that DNNs are implicitly self-regularizing and thus might benefit less from external regularization as they increase in depth and size \cite{martin2018implicit}.
\subsection{SVHN}
To demonstrate that loss function optimization scales with dataset size, EPBT was applied to SVHN \cite{netzer2011reading}, a larger image classification task. This dataset is composed of around 600,000 training images and 26,000 testing images. Following existing practices \cite{huang2017densely}, the dataset was normalized but no data augmentation was used during training. The baseline model was optimized with SGD on the full training set for a total of 40 epochs, with the learning rate decaying from 0.1 by a factor of 10 at 20 and 30 epochs. EPBT was run for 40 generations, each with one epoch of training, and a validation set of 30,000 images was separated for evaluating individuals. Otherwise, the experiment setup was identical to the CIFAR-10 domain.
Figure~\ref{fig:svhn_res} gives a comparison of EPBT against Baseline 1 in the SVHN domain. As expected, EPBT achieves higher test accuracy than the baseline. Like in the earlier experiments with CIFAR-10 and ResNet-32, both EPBT variants learn faster and converge to a high test accuracy at the end. Interestingly, while the baseline begins to overfit and drop in accuracy at the end of training, EPBT's regularization mechanisms allow it to avoid this effect and maintain performance.
\begin{table*}[t]
\begin{center}
\begin{footnotesize}
\begin{sc}
\begin{tabular}{lcccccc}
\toprule
Algorithm & CIFAR-10, ResNet-32 & CIFAR-10, WRN-10-12 & CIFAR-10, WRN-16-8 & CIFAR-10, WRN-22-6 & CIFAR-10, WRN-28-5 & SVHN, ResNet-32 \\
\midrule
Baseline 1 (no PBT) & 168 & 168 & 168 & 176 & 184 & 21 \\
Baseline 2 (PBT) & 128 & -- & -- & -- & -- & -- \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{sc}
\end{footnotesize}
\end{center}
\vskip 0.15in
\caption{Number of training epochs required for EPBT to exceed the final test accuracy of the baselines. The baselines were trained for 200 epochs in CIFAR-10 and 40 epochs in SVHN. EPBT surpasses most of the baselines at around 80\% into the run.}
\label{table:epbt_results2}
\vspace*{-3ex}
\end{table*}
\section{Analysis of Results}
This section analyzes the performance and computational complexity of EPBT, as well as the loss functions and learning rate schedules that EPBT discovered.
\subsection{Performance}
A summary of the final test accuracies at the end of training for EPBT and the baselines is shown in Table~\ref{table:epbt_results}. The results show that EPBT achieves the best results for multiple datasets and model architectures. Another noticeable benefit provided by EPBT is the ability to train models to convergence significantly faster than non-population based methods, especially with a limited number of training epochs. This is because multiple models are simultaneously trained with EPBT, each with different loss functions. If progress is made in one of the models, its higher fitness leads to that model's loss function or weights being shared among the rest of the models, thus lifting their performance as well.
Table~\ref{table:epbt_results2} details how many epochs of training are required for EPBT to surpass the fully trained performance of the baselines. As expected, EPBT outperforms the baselines on most architectures after training for 80\% the total number of epochs. The results are remarkable considering that Baseline 1 is trained on the full training set, while EPBT is not. These experiments thus demonstrate the power of EPBT in not just training better models but doing it faster too.
The experiments also suggest that EPBT's main components, i.e.\ the metalearning evolutionary loop, genetic operators, Novelty Selection and Pulsation, TaylorGLO parameterization, and PBD, serve as powerful metalearning and regularization tools when combined. While each component has its own weaknesses, other components can help mitigate them. For example, TaylorGLO is useful for its regularizing effects, but the search space is large and potentially deceptive. However, Novelty Selection and Pulsation can help overcome this deception by maintaining population diversity. Similarly, PBD is a powerful general regularization tool that requires a good teacher model to work. Conveniently, such a model is provided by the elite individuals in EPBT's population.
\subsection{Computational Complexity}
Compared to simpler hyperparameter tuning methods that do not interleave training and optimization, EPBT is much more efficient. On the CIFAR-10 dataset, EPBT discovered 40 new loss functions during the first generation and an additional 20 loss functions every subsequent generation. EPBT was run for 25 generations and thus was able to explore up to 520 unique TaylorGLO parameterizations. This process is efficient despite how large the search space is; if grid search is performed at intervals of $1.0$, a total of $21^8$ (38 billion) unique loss function parameterizations will have to be evaluated.
Furthermore, the computational complexity of EPBT scales linearly with the population size and not with the number of loss functions explored. Loss function evaluation is efficient in EPBT because it is not necessary to retrain the model from scratch whenever a new loss function is discovered; the model's weights are copied over from an existing model with good performance. If each of the 520 discovered loss functions was used to fully train a model from random initialization, over 100,000 epochs of training would be required, much higher than the 8,000 epochs EPBT needed.
Because EPBT evaluates all the individuals in the population in parallel, the real-time complexity of each generation is not significantly higher than training a single model for the same number of epochs. Furthermore, the amount of time spent in Steps 1 and 2 to generate new individuals is negligible compared to Step 3, where model training occurs. The EPBT experiments in this paper were run on a machine with eight NVIDIA V100 GPUs and utilized several GPU-days worth of compute. When comparing computational cost to EPBT, Baseline 1 used 40 times less compute while Baseline 2 (PBT) required the same amount.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{EPBT/images/ancestry.pdf}
\caption{EPBT loss function ancestries for the best candidates across five different runs on CIFAR-10 with ResNet-32. Their shapes are simplified into a 2D binary classification loss \cite{gonzalez2019glo} for visualization purposes. Cross-entropy loss is shown in the bottom right plot for comparison. Loss functions in the starting generations with fewer training epochs are darker, while functions from later generations with more training are lighter. Some runs have fewer ancestors because elitism allows the same loss function to be reused for multiple generations. Across all runs, there is a temporal pattern in the loss function ancestry. Early loss functions tend to regularize more (indicated by a positive slope at $y=1$), while later functions encourage more accurate fitting to the ground-truth labels.}
\label{fig:loss_change}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Loss Functions}
Do the loss functions discovered by EPBT stay static or adapt to the current stage of the training process? An analysis of functions discovered by EPBT during an experiment indicates that they do change significantly over the generations.
To characterize how the loss functions adapt with increased training, the ancestries for the final top-performing functions across five separate runs of EPBT (CIFAR-10, ResNet-32) are shown in Figure~\ref{fig:loss_change}. The cross-entropy loss (as used in Baseline 1) is plotted for comparison as well. Ancestry is determined by tracing the sequence of individuals $M_{0i} \ldots M_{ni}$, where $M_{(g-1)i}$ is the parent whose $\mathbf{D}_{(g-1)i}$ and $\mathbf{h}_{(g-1)i}$ were used to create $M_{gi}$. The sequence is simplified by removing any duplicate individuals that do not change between generations due to elitism, thus causing some runs to have shorter ancestries.
Because the loss functions are multidimensional, graphing them is not straightforward. However, for visualization purposes, the losses can be simplified into a 2D binary classification modality where $y=1$ represents a perfect prediction, and $y=0$ represents a completely incorrect prediction \cite{gonzalez2019glo}. This approach makes it clear that the loss generally decreases as the predicted labels become more accurate and closer to the ground-truth labels.
There is an interesting trend across all five runs: the loss functions optimized by EPBT are not all monotonically-decreasing. Instead, there are parabolic losses that have a minimum of around $0.7$ and rises slightly as $y$ approaches $1$. Such concavity is likely a form of regularization that prevents the network from overfitting to the training data by penalizing low-entropy prediction distributions centered around $y=1$. Similar behavior was observed when training using GLO \cite{gonzalez2019glo}.
The plots also show that the loss functions change shape as training progresses. As the number of epochs increases, the slope near $y=1$ becomes increasingly positive, suggesting less regularization would occur. This result is consistent with recent research that suggests regularization is most important during a critical period early in the training process \cite{golatkar2019time}. If regularization is reduced or removed after this critical period, generalization sometimes may even improve. In EPBT, this principle was discovered and optimized without any prior knowledge as part of the metalearning process. EPBT thus provides an automatic way for exploring metaknowledge that could be difficult to come upon manually.
Since different stages of EPBT utilize different types of loss functions, it is possible that a single static loss might not be optimal for the entire training process. Furthermore, loss functions that change makes sense considering that the learning dynamics for some DNNs are non-stationary or unstable \cite{jaderberg2017population}. For example, adaptive losses might improve the training of generative adversarial networks \cite{goodfellow2014generative, radford2015unsupervised}.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.49\linewidth]{EPBT/images/lr.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=0.49\linewidth]{EPBT/images/lr_log.pdf}
\caption{Visualization of how the learning rate and momentum of the best individual in the population changes during an EPBT run. The right plot is a log-scale version of the left plot. A cyclic and decaying learning rate pattern is present, while no such pattern exists for momentum.}
\label{fig:sgd_hyperparam}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Learning Rate Schedules}
In addition to the TaylorGLO parameters, EPBT also optimized SGD hyperparameters such as learning rate schedule and momentum. Figure~\ref{fig:sgd_hyperparam} shows how these parameters of the best individual in the population changes over the course of an EPBT run (CIFAR-10, ResNet-32). While momentum remains mostly the same with some occasional dips and bumps, there is a clear downward, decaying trend for learning rate. The discovered learning rate schedule shares several similarities with hand designed schedules: both use high learning rates early in training for rapid learning but lower learning rates later to fine tune the model weights. More interestingly, there appears to be several cycles in the EPBT optimized schedule where the learning rate repeatedly goes up and down. This might be due the beneficial effects of cyclic learning rates in helping SGD escape from saddle points in the loss landscape during training \cite{smith2017cyclical}.
\section{Discussion and Future Work}
When viewed from the EA perspective, EPBT is a more complex variant of PBT \cite{jaderberg2017population}. Mutation corresponds to the \textit{explore} step and elitism corresponds to the \textit{exploit} step in PBT. Besides Novelty Pulsation, EPBT improves upon PBT in two major ways. First, EPBT makes use of uniform Gaussian mutation (compared to the deterministic mutation in PBT) and uniform crossover. These biologically inspired heuristics allow PBT to scale better to higher dimensions. In particular, the crossover operator plays an important role in discovering good global solutions in large search spaces \cite{goldberg1988genetic, whitley1994genetic}. Second, EPBT utilizes tournament selection, a heuristic that helps prevent premature convergence to a local optimum \cite{shukla2015comparative}.
One possible direction of future work is be to allow the loss function parameterization to take the current state of training as input, potentially resulting in more refined training and better performance. Alternatively, domain information could be taken into account, allowing the learned loss function schedules to be more easily transferred to different tasks. EPBT could also be extended to include neural architecture search to jointly optimize network structure and loss functions. A more detailed study on how network architecture impacts EPBT performance and what components are necessary for training a particular DNN architectures could also lead to better models in the future. Another compelling direction would be to understand the synergies of the various components of EPBT. Ablation studies can be used to characterize the contribution that each component provides. Lastly, more experimental runs can be performed to improve statistical analysis of EPBT and the baselines.
\section{Conclusion}
This paper presents EPBT, an evolutionary algorithm for regularization metalearning. EPBT first improves upon PBT by introducing more advanced genetic operators. It then focuses it on regularization by evolving TaylorGLO loss functions. The deceptive interactions of weight and loss adaptation require more diversity, which is achieved through Novelty Pulsation, and more careful avoidance of overfitting, which is achieved through Population-Based Distillation. On the CIFAR-10 and SVHN image classification benchmarks with several ResNet and Wide Resnet architectures, EPBT achieved faster and better model training. An analysis of the optimized loss functions suggests that these advantages stem from discovering strong regularization automatically. Furthermore, an adaptive loss function schedule naturally emerges as a likely key to achieving such performance. EPBT thus forms a practical method for regularization metalearning in deep networks.
\bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 5,438 |
« Reply #3540 on: November 04, 2015, 04:48:54 PM »
http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/11/04/fr_lombardi_responds_to_details_of_book_publications/1184415
Fr. Lombardi responds to details of book publications
(Vatican Radio) The director of the Holy See Press Office, Fr. Federico Lombardi, commented on Wednesday on the forthcoming publication of two new books based on confidential Vatican documents.
Noting that some of the information in these two volumes has already been made public, Fr. Lombardi stressed that much of the content contains details from leaked private documents and is therefore the result of illegal activities which will be investigated by the competent Vatican authorities.
Furthermore, Fr. Lombardi said, it was Pope Francis himself who requested the gathering of this information in order to help him with the process of reforming the financial and administrative running of the Vatican and of the Holy See.
In particular, he noted that the COSEA commission, from whose archives much of the information is drawn, was established by the Pope on July 18th 2013 and then dissolved once it had completed its mandate.
Fr. Lombardi also noted that there are many different interpretations of the facts and figures that have been leaked; for example he noted that the pension fund has been described as both a worrying black 'hole' and a reassuring situation.
Regarding the use of the large amount of property belonging to the Vatican, Fr. Lombardi noted that the income is used for the long-term management of the huge network of services connected to the Holy See and other institutions, both in Rome and in other parts of the world.
Details regarding the origin and history of these properties are readily available; for example, in the financial accords between Italy and the Holy See in the context of the Lateran pacts.
Responding to questions about St Peter's Pence, Fr. Lombardi noted that the money given by the faithful is used for a variety of different causes, at the Pope's discretion.
While charity and assistance to the poor are two of the main destinations of that money, they may also include funding for the Roman Curia, initiatives outside of the Diocese of Rome, communicating the Papal Magisterium to different parts of the globe and supporting the 180 diplomatic missions of the Holy See which support the local churches.
http://www.news.va/en/news/papal-audience-importance-of-family-as-place-of-fo
Papal audience: importance of family as place of forgiveness
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis held his weekly general audience in St Peter's Square on Wednesday morning. In his catechisis, he continued to reflect on the importance of family as a place where we learn the values of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Dear Brothers and Sisters: Following the recent Assembly of the Synod of Bishops which reflected on the vocation and mission of the family, today we reflect on the importance of the family as the place where we learn the value of forgiveness. Each day, in the words of the Our Father, we ask God to forgive us and to grant us the grace to forgive others. As difficult as forgiveness may be, it is essential for our personal growth, our capacity to acknowledge our failures and to mend broken relationships. It is a virtue we learn first in the family.
http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/full-text-on-giving-and-receiving-forgiveness-in-the-family
FULL TEXT: On Giving and Receiving Forgiveness in the Family
http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-francis-help-persecuted-christians-in-the-mid
Pope Francis: Help persecuted Christians in the Middle East
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis on Wednesday gave his support to the work of Aid to the Church in Need, which offers help to persecuted Christians around the world.
The Church in Poland is marking on Sunday a "Day of Solidarity with the Persecuted Church", which is promoted by Aid to the Church in Need in collaboration with the Polish Bishops' Conference. This year, the Day for Solidarity will be used to offer spiritual and material assistance in particular to Christians in Syria.
"Your work of prayer and solidarity brings relief and support to our brothers and sisters who suffer for Christ in the Middle East and around the world," Pope Francis said while greeting Polish pilgrims at his weekly general audience.
http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-francis-the-christian-includes-pharisees-excl
Pope Francis: The Christian includes; Pharisees exclude
(Vatican Radio) The Christian includes, he does not close the door to anyone, even if this provokes resistance. He who excludes, because he believes himself to be better, generates conflicts and divisions, and does not consider the fact that "we shall all stand before the judgment seat of God." That was the message of Pope Francis during Thursday morning's Mass at Casa Santa Marta.
The attitude of Christ is to include
In the Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul exhorts us not to judge and not to despise our brothers, because, the Pope said, this leads to excluding them from "our little group," to being selective, and this is not Christian." Christ, in fact, "with His sacrifice on Calvary" unites and includes "all men in salvation." In the Gospel, publicans and sinners draw near to Jesus – "that is, the excluded, all those that were outside," – and "the Pharisees and the scribes complained":
http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/cardinal-pells-office-new-books-contain-false-and-misleading-claims
Cardinal Pell's Office: New Books Contain 'False and Misleading Claims'
by Edward Pentin 11/05/2015
Cardinal George Pell – CNA
The Vatican Secretariat for the Economy has said two new books, each containing leaked Vatican financial information, have "included false and misleading claims" regarding "management of expenditure" and "expenditure incurred" by Cardinal George Pell, the Secretariat's prefect.
In a statement issued this evening, the Secretariat has sought to correct the allegations made in the two newly-published books, Avarice: The Papers That Reveal Wealth, Scandals and Secrets in the Church of Francis and Via Crucis, by Italian journalists Emiliano Fittipaldi and Gianluigi Nuzzi.
The statement says that the Secretariat for the Economy completed the year "well below its 2014 Budget and was one of the very few entities to propose a reduction in total expenditure in its 2015 Budget submission."
Here below is full text of the Secretariat's statement:
http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-church-is-called-to-serve-not-to-be-served
Pope: Church is called to serve, not to be served
(Vatican Radio) In his homily during Mass on Friday morning, Pope Francis said the Church is called to serve, not to be concerned solely with business affairs; and that Bishops and priests must overcome the temptation to live a "double life." He warned, too, about "climbers," those who are attached to money.
Pope Francis developed his homily based on two images of servants presented in the readings from the day's liturgy. First, he presented the figure of Saint Paul "who gave himself completely to service, always" such that he ended up in Rome betrayed by those who were close to him, and "condemned." Where did this greatness of the Apostles come from? the Pope asked. It came from Jesus Christ, and Saint Paul "boasts of serving Him, of being chosen, of having the strength of the Holy Spirit."
The Christian is called to serve, not to be served
He was the servant who served, the Pope said, "he ministered, laying the foundation, that is, announcing Jesus Christ" and "he never stopped to take advantage of his position, of his authority, of being served. He was a minister, a servant in order to serve, not to be served."
http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-francis-meets-pro-life-movement-supporters
Pope Francis meets Pro-Life Movement supporters
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis urged pro-life supporters on Friday (6th November) to continue their important work of defending human life at all stages whilst also taking into account the difficult situations that many of our brothers and sisters have to face or endure. He was speaking to participants at a national conference organized by the Italian Pro-Life Movement (Movimento per la Vita).
The Pope said in the existential dynamics, everything is interrelated and we need to nurture personal and social sensitivity, both towards welcoming a new life and towards those situations of poverty and exploitation that affect the weakest and most disadvantaged.
Quoting from his encyclical Laudato Si, Pope Francis asked how can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable human beings, if we fail to protect a human embryo? As disciples of Christ, helping a wounded human life means reaching out to all people in need, putting ourselves by their side and sharing their fragility and their pain. How many families and old and young people, he said, are vulnerable because of poverty, sickness, the lack of a job or a home.
http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/11/06/pope_receives_the_governor_general_of_grenada/1184911
Pope receives the Governor General of Grenada
Pope Francis with Cecile Ellen Fleurette La Grenade, Governor General of Grenada
(Vatican Radio/VIS) Pope Francis on Friday morning received in audience the governor general of Grenada, Cecile Ellen Fleurette La Grenade in the Vatican Apostolic Palace.
La Grenade subsequently met with Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, accompanied by Archbishop Paul Gallagher, Secretary for Relations with States.
During the cordial discussions, emphasis was placed on the good bilateral relations between the Holy See and Grenada, as well as the important contribution of the Catholic Church to the development of the country, especially with reference to social challenges and the education of the young.
http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/pope-gives-interview-to-dutch-paper-published-by-homeless
Pope Gives Interview to Dutch Paper Published by Homeless
Rome, November 06, 2015
The Dutch newspaper "Straatnieuws", published by the homeless, today published an interview granted by Pope Francis on 27 October. The article is also present in other dailies of the same type associated with the International Network of Street Papers (INSP), which has 113 members. This type of publication is sold directly by the homeless, thus providing them with a source of income.
The following are extensive extracts from the interview, especially with the theme of poverty.
Interviewer: What is the Church's message for the homeless? What does Christian solidarity mean for them in practice?
Pope Francis: "Two things come to mind. Jesus came to the world homeless, and made Himself poor. Then, the Church wishes to embrace all and to say that it is a right to have a roof over your head. In popular movements they work according to the three Spanish 't's: trabajo (work), techo (casa) and tierra (earth). The Church teaches that every person has a right to all three".
Interviewer: You often ask for attention to the poor and refugees. Do you not fear that in this way a sort of weariness in relation to this theme may be generated in the mass media or in society in general?
Pope Francis: "When we return to a theme that is not pleasant, because it is disagreeable to talk about it, we are all tempted to say. 'That's enough, I am tired of this'. I feel that this weariness exists, but I am not afraid of it. I must continue to speak the truth and say how these things are".
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/pope-francis-explains-why-he-wont-sell-the-churchs-treasures-14546/
Pope Francis explains why he won't sell the Church's 'treasures'
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/2812/0/moderate-named-new-head-of-catholic-church-in-belgium
Moderate named new head of Catholic Church in Belgium
Pope Francis today named Jozef De Kesel as the new Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and de facto leader of the Catholic Church in Belgium.
Currently Bishop of Bruges, he is seen as a moderate in comparison to his conservative predecessor, Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, whose offer of retirement aged 75 has been promptly accepted by the Pope.
Bishop De Kesel, 68, has called for a relaxation of mandatory celibacy for priests and said that women's ordination is "negotiable."
At a press conference announcing his appointment in Brussels today, he is reported to have stressed his "respect" for gay people adding that respect for each person, regardless of their sexual orientation, "is a value that the Gospel shares with modern culture."
http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/2015/11/amid-new-vatileaks-popes-deepens-his.html
Amid Vatileaks Frenzy, Francis Deepens His Eurostamp
http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-francis-support-workers-and-their-needs
Pope Francis: Support workers and their needs
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis on Saturday greeted employees of Italian National Social Security Institute in St Peter's Square, where he stressed the importance of supporting the dignity of work and workers.
In his prepared remarks to the estimated 23 thousand employees and executives of the Italian National Social Security Institute or INPS, gathered in St Peter's Square on Saturday, Pope Francis told them that they had an important role in society in that they have been entrusted with, what the Holy Father defined at the right to rest.
The Pope was referring not only to benefits of which every employee is entitled but also to spiritual rest such as on a Sunday, the rest God wanted on the seventh day
http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-francis-meets-with-2015-nobel-peace-prize-win
Pope Francis meets with 2015 Nobel Peace Prize winners from Tunisia
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis met privately with the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize winners on Saturday, calling them "architects of peace."
The 2015 Prize went to Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, for what the Nobel Committee called "its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011."
Pope Francis met for 15 minutes with Mohamed Fadhel Mahfoudh, Abdessatar Ben Moussa, Wided Bouchamaoui, and Houcine Abbassi on Saturday morning.
The four represented the Tunisian General Labour Union; the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts; the Tunisian Human Rights League, and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers. The four organizations helped to establish a new constitution and presidential elections last year after a series of political assassinations in 2013.
http://www.lancasterdiocese.org.uk/read-bishop-campbells-english-working-translation-for-synod15-final-relatio-document-in-full-here/
Read Bishop Campbell's English Working Translation for #Synod15 Final Relatio document in full here
http://www.lancasterdiocese.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Final-Relatio15-Final.pdf
SYNOD15 - FINAL RELATIO OF THE SYNOD OF BISHOPS TO
THE HOLY FATHER, FRANCIS, 24TH OCTOBER, 2015
(A Working English Translation from the Orginial Italian - by Bishop
Michael G Campbell OSA of the Catholic Diocese of Lancaster, England
on 7 November 2015).
The following is the text of the final Relatio of the Synod of Bishops presented to the
Holy Father, Pope Francis, at the close of the 14th ordinary general assembly (4th –
25th October 2015) on the theme of "The vocation and mission of the family in the
Church and in the modern world."
http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-recent-leaking-of-documents-was-a-crime
Pope: recent stealing of documents was a crime
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis said on Sunday (8th November) that the recent stealing and leaking of the Holy See's confidential documents was "a crime" and "deplorable act that does not help." But at the same time he said this "sad event" definitely does not in any way deter him from pressing ahead with his planned reforms of the Roman Curia with the help of his advisers. The Pope's remarks came at the end of his Sunday Angelus address.
Please find below a translation into English of the Pope's remarks about the leaking of the Holy See's documents:
"Dear brothers and Sisters,
I know that many of you have been upset by the news circulating in recent days concerning the Holy See's confidential documents that were taken and published.
For this reason I want to tell you, first of all, that stealing those documents was a crime. It's a deplorable act that does not help. I personally had asked for that study to be carried out and both I and my advisers were well acquainted with (the contents of) those documents and steps have been taken that have started to bear fruit, some of them even visible.
Therefore I wish to reassure you that this sad event certainly does not deter me from the reform project that we are carrying out, together with my advisers and with the support of all of you. Yes, with the support of the whole Church because the Church renews itself with prayer and the daily holiness of each baptized person.
I therefore thank you and ask you to continue to pray for the Pope and the Church, without getting upset or troubled but proceeding with faith and hope."
http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/angelus-address-on-the-poor-widow-s-offering
Angelus Address: On the Poor Widow's Offering
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NB6vRajAVM
Angelus Domini 2015.11.08
http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-francis-meets-with-president-of-poland
Pope Francis meets with President of Poland
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis on Monday received the President of Poland, Andrzej Duda, who subsequently met with the Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, accompanied by Msgr. Antoine Camilleri, under-secretary for Relations with States.
A statement from the Holy See Press Office called the discussions "cordial", adding the Church's positive contribution to Polish society was emphasised, also in view of the Holy Father's planned visit to Kraków next year for World Youth Day.
The also spoke on various themes of mutual interest, such as the promotion of the family, support for social groups most in need, and the welcome of migrants.
http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-francis-offers-dominicans-indulgence-for-jubi
Pope Francis offers Dominicans indulgence for Jubilee
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis has granted the possibility of receiving a plenary indulgence for all the faithful taking part in the Jubilee marking the 800th anniversary of the Order of Preachers, better known as the Dominican Order. This includes those participating in celebrations both internationally and in each Dominican province.
The terms and conditions to receive the indulgence are described in the document sent by the Apostolic Penitentiary. Pope Francis has also encouraged all the priests of the Dominican Order to make themselves available to celebrate the Sacrament of Penance in all Jubilee places and frequently administer the Holy Communion to the infirm.
« Last Edit: November 09, 2015, 05:16:23 PM by grace-land » Logged
http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/11/09/pope_ordains_bishop_during_mass_at_st_john_lateran/1185537
Pope ordains Bishop during Mass at St John Lateran
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis celebrated Mass at the Archbasilica of St John Lateran on Monday evening in a ceremony that included the ordination of a new auxiliary Bishop for the Diocese of Rome.
Pope Francis travelled across Rome to celebrate the Feast of the Dedication of St John Lateran – the Cathedral Church of the Diocese of Rome, known as the "mother and head of all the Churches of Rome and of the whole world."
During the Liturgy, the Holy Father ordained Monsignor Angelo De Donatis to the episcopate. Bishop De Donatis had been serving as pastor of the parish of Saint Mark the Evangelist in Rome, and will now take up the duties of an auxiliary Bishop for the Diocese.
Pope Francis' homily was based on the text prescribed in the Roman Pontifical for the ordination of a Bishop. The homily focuses on the role of a Bishop: "In the person of the bishop, with his priests around him, Jesus Christ, the Lord, who became High Priest for ever, is present among you. Through the ministry of the bishop, Christ himself continues to proclaim the Gospel and to confer the mysteries of faith on those who believe. Through the fatherly action of the bishop, Christ adds new members to his body. Through the bishop's wisdom and prudence, Christ guides you in your earthly pilgrimage toward eternal happiness."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVXgiLVnvds
Holy Mass with episcopal consecration - 2015.11.09
« Reply #3557 on: November 10, 2015, 12:01:39 AM »
Currently, local time in New York is 6 hours behind Rome.
https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/travels/2015/inside/documents/papa-francesco-prato-firenze_2015.html
PASTORAL VISIT OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS
TO PRATO AND FLORENCE
on the occasion of the Fifth National Convention
of the Italian Catholic Church
7:00 Departure by helicopter from the Vatican
8:00 Landing on the municipal sports field of Prato
8:15 Visit to the Cathedral of Prato
Meeting with the world of labour in the square in front of the Cathedral
[Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish]
9:00 Departure for Florence
Currently, local time in New York is 6 hours behind Rome -- If Rome is 8:00 a.m. then New York is 2:00 a.m.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH7bZm_ROew
Francis in Prato: Meeting with the world of labor - 2015.11.10
Scheduled for Nov 10, 2015
Starts at 08.00 am. Pope Francis makes a pastoral visit to Prato and Florence (Tuscany, Italy). In Prato he meets the world of labor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGwSO0HZlTA
Pope Francis' arrival in Florence - 2015.11.10
Pope Francis arrives in Florence for a pastoral visit in the occasion of the Fifth National (Italian) Ecclesial Convention
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIscJnJd4xM
Francis in Florence meets participants at Italian Church Convention -2015.11.10
Starts at 09.45 am. Pope Francis on a pastoral visit to Florence meets the participants at the Fifth National Ecclesial Convention on the theme "In Jesus Christ the New Humanism" (Florence November 9 - 13, 2015)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL5Ao5KkozA
Francis in Florence: Holy Mass - 2015.11.10
Starts at 3.00 pm. In the course of his pastoral visit to Florence, Pope Francis presides at Holy Mass in the Artemio Franchi Stadium
http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-in-prato-combat-cancer-of-corruption
Pope in Prato: Combat cancer of corruption
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis Tuesday commenced his visit to the Tuscan cities of Prato and Florence with a call to be ready to journey with Christ, and an appeal against the exploitation of workers.
"The life of every community demands that we combat the cancer of corruption, the cancer of human and labour exploitation and the poison of illegality," the Pope said, kicking off his visit to the region to mark the Fifth National Convention of the Italian Catholic Church.
Before meeting with labourers and labour representatives, the Pope venerated the "Girdle of Thomas" housed in Prato's main cathedral, a relic which legend holds was the cord or belt dropped from Mary during her Assumption into Heaven.
Speaking on the symbolism of this relic, the Pope noted how in scripture the girding of one's loins means "being ready, prepared to depart, to go out on a journey."
http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/pope-s-address-to-people-of-prato-italy
Pope's Address to People of Prato, Italy
Italy, November 10, 2015 | {
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} | 8,828 |
E'ahun (Eahun) ist der Hauptort des indonesischen Distrikts Rote Timur (Regierungsbezirk Rote Ndao, Provinz Ost-Nusa Tenggara). Der Ort liegt im Osten des Distrikts, im äußersten Osten der Roti. Die Meereshöhe von E'ahun beträgt .
Einzelnachweise
Ort in Indonesien
Ort in Asien
Rote Ndao
Geographie (Nusa Tenggara Timur) | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 248 |
package eu.dnetlib.iis.common;
import org.apache.hadoop.conf.Configuration;
import org.junit.jupiter.api.BeforeEach;
import org.junit.jupiter.api.Test;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;
import static org.junit.jupiter.api.Assertions.assertEquals;
import static org.junit.jupiter.api.Assertions.assertNull;
/**
* @author mhorst
*
*/
public class WorkflowRuntimeParametersTest {
Configuration configuration;
@BeforeEach
public void init() {
configuration = new Configuration();
}
@Test
public void testGetParamValue() throws Exception {
// given
String paramName = "paramName1";
String paramValue = "paramValue1";
configuration.set(paramName, paramValue);
// execute
String result = WorkflowRuntimeParameters.getParamValue(paramName, configuration);
// assert
assertEquals(paramValue, result);
}
@Test
public void testGetParamValueMissing() throws Exception {
// given
String paramName = "paramName1";
// execute
String result = WorkflowRuntimeParameters.getParamValue(paramName, configuration);
// assert
assertNull(result);
}
@Test
public void testGetParamValueBlank() throws Exception {
// given
String paramName = "paramName1";
String paramValue = "";
configuration.set(paramName, paramValue);
// execute
String result = WorkflowRuntimeParameters.getParamValue(paramName, configuration);
// assert
assertNull(result);
}
@Test
public void testGetIntegerParamValue() throws Exception {
// given
String paramName = "paramName1";
int paramValue = 12;
configuration.set(paramName, String.valueOf(paramValue));
// execute
Integer result = WorkflowRuntimeParameters.getIntegerParamValue(paramName, configuration);
// assert
assertEquals(paramValue, result.intValue());
}
@Test
public void testGetIntegerParamValueMissing() throws Exception {
// given
String paramName = "paramName1";
// execute
Integer result = WorkflowRuntimeParameters.getIntegerParamValue(paramName, configuration);
// assert
assertNull(result);
}
@Test
public void testGetParamValueWithFallback() throws Exception {
// given
String paramName = "paramName1";
String paramValue = "paramValue1";
String paramNameMissing = "paramNameMissing";
configuration.set(paramName, paramValue);
// execute
String result = WorkflowRuntimeParameters.getParamValue(
paramNameMissing, paramName, configuration);
// assert
assertEquals(paramValue, result);
}
@Test
public void testGetParamValueWithDefault() throws Exception {
// given
String paramName = "paramName1";
String paramValue = "paramValue1";
String paramNameMissing = "paramNameMissing";
String paramDefaultValue = "defaultValue";
Map<String, String> parameters = new HashMap<>();
parameters.put(paramName, paramValue);
// execute & assert
assertEquals(paramValue,
WorkflowRuntimeParameters.getParamValue(paramName, paramDefaultValue, parameters));
assertEquals(paramDefaultValue,
WorkflowRuntimeParameters.getParamValue(paramNameMissing, paramDefaultValue, parameters));
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 7,786 |
Valley Line LRT to Mill Woods delayed a further 6 months, documents say
The southeast leg of the Valley Line LRT will open six months later than expected, according to documents obtained by CBC News.
The city's latest timeline had the 13-kilometre line linking Mill Woods to downtown opening on Dec. 15, 2020.
However, a revised construction schedule from April 2019 obtained by CBC News last week through the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, projects a "six months delay to service commencement."
The schedule was part of a monthly project-status report prepared in May by SMA Consulting Ltd., a company hired by the City of Edmonton to help manage the project.
CBC News requested reports over a seven-month period starting in December 2018, but received only some of the reports.
As of last week, the City of Edmonton and TransEd, a consortium of companies involved with constructing the line, would not commit to any specific timelines.
Stephanie Dubois/CBC
"The service commencement is trending late and likely will be delayed," said Brad Smid, the city's project director for the Valley Line LRT.
"At this point, we're not going to commit to any date beyond saying sometime in 2021."
As of Friday, the project is "over 60 per cent complete," Smid said.
TransEd contract manager Dallas Lindskoog said construction crews have "made a lot of progress in a lot of areas of the job," but that the project is still behind.
Everyone's disappointed when we can't deliver these things on the original target date that's set - Brad Smid, Valley Line LRT project director
"We are trending late into 2021 for sure and we do expect that we will be done as soon as possible in 2021. We're working hard towards that, but certainly we will be a little bit late," he said.
Unexpected concrete mass
The biggest construction delay for the $1.8-billion line was a large concrete mass found nine metres below the surface of the North Saskatchewan River during the Tawatinâ Bridge construction.
Since then, TransEd crews have been trying to make up the lost time, Lindskoog said.
TransEd was able to make up some time, according to internal documents. The November-December 2018 monthly update to the city showed TransEd projected an eight-month service delay in its revised construction schedule.
Other delays
There are also delays in the shipment by Bombardier of the light rail vehicles (LRVs).
The 26 LRVs for the southeast Valley Line LRT were supposed to be delivered to Edmonton by the end of November 2019, according to the January 2019 monthly report to the city.
Only seven LRVs were in Edmonton as of Friday, according to Smid.
"We're confident that we will have enough trains here for maximum service level. So we're not seeing lack of trains being a risk to starting service on the system," he said.
P3 penalties
The southeast portion of the Valley Line LRT is funded under a public-private partnership.
Any delays to the service start date means TransEd will be penalized, Smid said.
"There will be financial consequences. And that's built into the P3 model. Taxpayers are protected by the risk transfer and those mechanisms in the project agreement," he said.
"We are disappointed. I know TransEd is disappointed. Everyone's disappointed when we can't deliver these things on the original target date that's set. But we have seen measurable progress and you know we're continuing to work to get this through to the finish line."
As of Friday, the Valley Line LRT project is "moving from a civil road and rail construction" to the installation of overhead power for the trains and communication systems for the line, Lindskoog said.
Lindskoog expects trains will be tested in the Mill Woods section of the line in early 2020. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 1,562 |
Anaclet Mwumvaneza (ur. 4 grudnia 1956 w Murambi) – rwandyjski duchowny katolicki, biskup Nyundo od 2016.
Życiorys
Święcenia kapłańskie otrzymał 25 lipca 1991 i inkardynowany został do archidiecezji Kigali. Przez wiele lat pracował jako duszpasterz parafialny. W 2005 został dyrektorem diecezjalnej Caritas, a w 2013 objął funkcję krajowego sekretarza generalnego tej organizacji.
11 marca 2016 papież Franciszek mianował go ordynariuszem diecezji Nyundo. Sakry udzielił mu 21 maja 2016 jego poprzednik - biskup Alexis Habiyambere.
Przypisy
Bibliografia
[dostęp 2016-03-16]
Urodzeni w 1956
Rwandyjscy biskupi katoliccy | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 4,568 |
POSTED BY 60milliongirls | Feb, 13, 2022 |
A new honour for our team…
We are proud to announce that Wanda Bedard, founder and president of 60 million girls, has been named a recipient of the prestigious Meritorious Service Cross by Her Excellency the Right Honourable Mary Simon, Governor General of Canada.
The Meritorious Service Decorations recognize great Canadians for exceptional deeds accomplished over a limited period of time that bring honour to Canada. Wanda will receive this decoration in recognition of her ceaseless work in support of education for girls in developing countries and the many accomplishments achieved by 60 million girls – notably the development of our Mobile Learning Lab model – to bring e-learning to some of the most isolated communities and vulnerable children around the world.
I am honoured to receive this recognition and decoration for the work 60 million girls has accomplished over the past 15 years. It is, of course, only possible to have an impact on girls' education when working with a great network of collaborators. I also have the privilege of being part of an outstanding team of dedicated, determined and passionate volunteers who bring their varied perspectives and talents to help create new approaches to the huge challenge of ensuring all girls have access to a quality education. – Wanda Bedard
Success stories from Sierra Leone
60 million girls knows that the pandemic has forced the closure of schools around the world, disrupting the lives up millions of children and youth over the past two years. Adolescent girls in developing countries have been disproportionally impacted by COVID-19 and many will never return to the classroom. Our Adolescent Girls' Education Fund was created last year to address this pressing issue.
The first day with the Mobile Learning Lab
Our partner, CAUSE Canada, was the recipient of one of our 2021 grants. This project, titled We Day Kam Back (We Go Back), specifically targeted out-of-school girls, aged 12-16 years, who would participate in 30 accelerated learning centres located in the rural communities of Koinadugu and Falaba of northern Sierra Leone. The goal of the project is to offer quality accelerated learning opportunities so that the students can reintegrate to school with the necessary knowledge and confidence to stay in school and succeed. Our Mobile Learning Lab is a key component of the project as it offers high-quality learning and health resources.
The project, implemented at the beginning of Sierra Leone's school year in August, was well received by the communities, with additional support from the Mothers' Clubs. Girls were given school supplies and are supported by qualified tutors in a friendly environment. Indeed, though its original target was 640 girls, the demand was so great that there are now 820 students attending classes in all 30 communities 5 days a week.
After only six months, the project has already met with great success. 102 girls have already returned to the classroom though they continue to participate in the accelerated learning centres. Others have said how grateful they are that this initiative was offered to them. This is what some of them have to say:
Fatma, a 17-year-old student, dropped out of school to work on the farm because of a lack of funds when her father died three years ago. On learning of the program, Fatma was able to join and resume her education. Today, she says she is one of the happiest girls as she continues to study and fulfil her dream of becoming a doctor.
Mariama, another 17-year-old student, lost her father when she was in primary school. Like Fatma, the situation became difficult and Mariama left school to help her mother. Unfortunately, she became pregnant, though she lost the baby, and dropped out of school entirely for two years. The program is giving her a second chance to achieve her dreams.
Victoria is a 15-year-old orphan and has been living with her older sister, who dropped out of school to take care of her. However, her sister could no longer afford to both feed and send Victoria to school so she too had to drop out. She has made such excellent progress that she has been able to return to the main school to fulfil her dream of becoming a doctor.
Finah is a 15-year-old student who lost her mother at the age of 10 and, two years later, her father. Her stepmother would not support her in school and Finah married. She had a baby but, sadly, her husband died just a year later. She was encouraged by her aunt and CAUSE Canada to return to school and enrolled in the program. She now has hope that she can become a lawyer.
There is no doubt that this project is meeting its goal of helping out-of-school adolescent girls return to the classroom so that they can fulfil their dreams of a brighter future. We wish them every success.
Maasai girls graduate in Tanzania with the MLL's help
In 2017, we partnered with the Stephen Lewis Foundation and its field partner, Maasai Women Development Organization (MWEDO), in the remote Tanzanian community of Arusha. Our grant of $100,000 helped provide quality education, as well as financial support for school fees, meals, supplies, books, uniforms, lodging and food for one year to 100 Maasai girls in their first year of secondary school.
Ndinini Kimesera Sikar, co-founder of MWEDO, was our keynote speaker at our fall conference that year. Much to her delight, at the end of the evening she received a small suitcase filled with thirty tablets and a rechargeable server called a RACHEL-Plus – our Mobile Learning Lab. To our delight, MWEDO has been using the Mobile Learning Lab (MLL) ever since.
Ndinini Kimesera Sikar (in the middle to the right) with the graduates
In November 2021, 80 girls sat for their National Form Four examinations to enable them to receive a Certificate of Secondary Education Examination. Ndinini wrote to say that the results came out last month and all the girls had passed. This is, in part, Ndinini's comments:
My belief is that the girls worked very hard and with the support of our Mobile Learning lab, their performance increased so much more.
MWEDO mobile learning lab has been working well for the MWEDO secondary school. We use our MLL on a daily basis; our students and teachers are very happy about this program and have downloaded the Tanzania National curriculum, exams and passed papers for review by all students and teachers. The World Possible team have also supported us to upgrade the program and we now have access to more educational sites.
In the last two years we noticed increased performance in our students for English, Math and Science subjects such as chemistry and biology. The reasons behind this performance is due to girls' exposure to different learning sites and interesting readings available within the RACHEL Server.
The MWEDO National Form Four results of this year have proved that MLL can seriously improve learning outcomes for our students.
We couldn't be more pleased to hear that the Mobile Learning Lab has been so effective in helping the MWEDO students be successful in their studies and we extend our congratulations to them.
The graduation ceremony at the MWEDO Girls Secondary School
Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn for updates on developments around the world in education and educational technology and the activities of 60 million girls.
TAGS : Meritorious Service Cross Adolescent Girls' Education Fund CAUSE Canada Girls' education Mobile Learning Lab MWEDO Sierra Leone Stephen Lewis Foundation Tanzania | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 4,949 |
New restaurants: Timon Balloo's The Katherine in Fort Lauderdale, Truli Italian in Coconut Creek
Illinois recreational marijuana sales hit nearly $64 million in August, marking a new record
Marijuana shops in Illinois sold nearly $64 million in recreational weed during August, topping the previous record set in July by more than $3 million. (Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune)
Marijuana shops in Illinois sold nearly $64 million in recreational weed during August, topping the previous record set in July by more than $3 million.
Dispensaries have sold more than $360 million in recreational weed since sales became legal in the state on Jan. 1, according to information from the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation.
Latest Marijuana
Medical marijuana can be ordered online, judge rules
Medical marijuana: New rules in place for smoking the herb, but patients and doctors are unaware | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 7,250 |
📚 I got a pre-release version of Rise of the Mystics by my favorite author Ted Dekker!! So excited!!
@EddieHinkle New fiction from Dekker?
@EddieHinkle Does Beyond the Circle mean it's connected or not connected to the Circle series? | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 6,567 |
\section{Introduction\label{sec:intro}}
A distinctive feature of graphene \cite{Neto09} is the linear energy dispersion of its electrons and holes \cite{Wallace47}. It was predicted \cite{Mikhailov07e} that this feature should lead to a strongly nonlinear electrodynamic and optical response of this material in relatively weak external
electric fields. Subsequent experimental and theoretical studies confirmed this prediction, see, e.g. Refs. \cite{Mikhailov08a,Hendry10,Bykov12,Mikhailov11c,Cheng14a,Cheng14b,Cheng15,Mikhailov16a,Wang16,Mikhailov17a,Savostianova17a,Cheng17,Alexander17,MariniAbajo17,Savostianova18a,Mikhailov19b}. Currently, nonlinear electrodynamics and optics of graphene is a hot and quickly developing area of research.
Theoretically, the nonlinear electrodynamic response of graphene was mainly considered within the frameworks of the perturbation theory \cite{Mikhailov07e,Mikhailov08a,Cheng14a,Cheng14b,Cheng15,Mikhailov16a,Wang16,Cheng17}. Within such a theory, the electric current $\bm j(t)$ is expanded in a Taylor series up to the third order in powers of the electric field $\bm E(t)$,
\be
j_{\alpha}(t)=
\int_{-\infty}^\infty d\omega_1
\sigma_{\alpha\beta}^{(1)}(\omega_1)
E^\beta_{\omega_1}
e^{-i\omega_1 t} +
\int_{-\infty}^\infty d\omega_1
\int_{-\infty}^\infty d\omega_2
\int_{-\infty}^\infty d\omega_3
\sigma_{\alpha\beta\gamma\delta}^{(3)}(\omega_1,\omega_2,\omega_3)
E^\beta_{\omega_1}
E^\gamma_{\omega_2}
E^\delta_{\omega_3}
e^{-i(\omega_1 +\omega_2+\omega_3) t}+\dots
\label{Taylor}
\ee
where $E^\beta_{\omega}$ are Fourier components of the time-dependent electric field
\be
E_{\alpha}(t)=\int_{-\infty}^\infty d\omega E_\omega^{\alpha} e^{-i\omega t}.
\label{fieldFourier}
\ee
The linear and third-order conductivities $\sigma_{\alpha\beta}^{(1)}(\omega_1)$ and $\sigma_{\alpha\beta\gamma\delta}^{(3)}(\omega_1,\omega_2,\omega_3)$ have been calculated as functions of frequencies $\omega_1$, $\omega_2$, $\omega_3$, Fermi energy $E_F$ and scattering parameters in Refs. \cite{Gusynin07b,Falkovsky07a,Mikhailov07d} and \cite{Cheng14a,Cheng15,Mikhailov16a} respectively. The latter describes a large number of different physical effects, such as the third harmonic generation (at $\omega_1=\omega_2=\omega_3$), saturable absorption and Kerr effect (at $\omega_1=\omega_2=-\omega_3$), direct current induced second harmonic generation (at $\omega_1=\omega_2$ and $\omega_3=0$), static photoconductivity (at $\omega_1=-\omega_2$ and $\omega_3=0$) and many other.
The perturbation approach allows to obtain corrections to results of the linear theory, but its applicability is also restricted: the Taylor expansion (\ref{Taylor}) implies that the third order term is smaller than the first one. However, in many experiments the external electric field is so strong that the third-order theory becomes insufficient for a proper description of the nonlinear response of the material. In graphene this may happen already in electric fields of order of $1-3$ kV/cm \cite{Mikhailov07e,Mikhailov08a}. In such cases a nonperturbative theory is required.
In Ref. \cite{Mikhailov17a} we have developed a \textit{nonperturbative quasiclassical} theory of the nonlinear electrodynamic response of uniform graphene. The kinetic Boltzmann equation was solved there in the relaxation time approximation, which allowed to describe the graphene response to arbitrarily strong external electric fields at ``low'' (microwave, terahertz, infrared) frequencies satisfying the condition $\hbar\omega\lesssim 2E_F$. In Ref. \cite{Mikhailov17a} we applied our general results to the case, when a strong ac electric field $E_\omega\sin\omega t$ acts on the system, and analyzed the odd harmonics generation and Kerr effects.
In this paper we apply the theory \cite{Mikhailov17a} to the analysis of another physical effect, the static photoconductivity of graphene. Without irradiation, the graphene response to a weak external dc electric field $\bm E_0$ is described by the conventional isotropic Drude conductivity $\sigma_0$, $\bm j_0=\sigma_0\bm E_0$. Now we assume that, in addition to the weak dc field $\bm E_0$, a strong monochromatic ac electric field $\bm E_{\rm ac}(t)$ acts on graphene electrons,
\be
\bm E(t)=\bm E_0+\bm E_{\rm ac}(t),
\label{ext-field}
\ee
and calculate the resulting time-averaged direct current in the linear order in $\bm E_0$,
\be
j_\alpha^0=\sigma_{\alpha\beta}^{\mathrm{ph}}(\bm E_{\rm ac}) E_\beta^0.
\label{ph-cond}
\ee
The photoconductivity tensor $\sigma_{\alpha\beta}^{\mathrm{ph}}(\bm E_{\rm ac})$ here is a function of graphene parameters as well as the amplitude, frequency and polarization of the incident radiation. We analyze these dependencies and compare the nonperturbative results with those obtained within the third-order perturbation theory.
Theoretically the photoconductivity of graphene was studied in a number of publications, see, e.g., Refs. \cite{Vasko08,Romanets10,Bao10,Trushin11,Shao15,Singh18,Ryzhii19}. Most of these papers mainly focused on the photoresponse of \textit{intrinsic} graphene ($E_F\approx 0$) generated by the \textit{interband} excitation of charge carriers, $\hbar\omega\gtrsim 2E_F$, which is typically relevant for near-IR/optical excitation. Here we concentrate on the opposite limit $\hbar\omega\lesssim 2E_F$ where the interband transitions can be ignored and which is relevant for microwave/terahertz/mid-IR excitation of the system. For example, if the density of graphene electrons is $\sim 10^{13}$ cm$^{-2}$, the condition $\hbar\omega\lesssim 2E_F$ is satisfied at frequencies $f\lesssim 175$ THz or the wavelength $\lambda\gtrsim 1.7$ $\mu$m.
\section{Theory and results\label{sec:Theory}}
\subsection{General formulas\label{sec:GenFormulas}}
Within the quasiclassical approach the nonlinear electrodynamic response of graphene to the field (\ref{ext-field}) can be described by the Boltzmann equation in the relaxation time approximation,
\be
\frac{\p f(\bm p,t)}{\p t}-e\bm E(t)\frac{\p f(\bm p,t)}{\p \bm p}=-\frac{f(\bm p,t)-f_0(\bm p)}{\tau}\label{be},
\ee
where
\be
f_0({\bm p})=\left[1+\exp\left(\frac {E_{\bm p}-\mu}T\right)\right]^{-1}
\ee
is the Fermi-Dirac distribution function, and $\tau$ is the momentum relaxation time, which we assume to be energy independent. For definiteness we will consider graphene electrons assuming that the chemical potential is positive, $\mu>0$, and will describe their spectrum near Dirac points by the linear energy dispersion
\be
E_{\bm p}=v_F|\bm p|=v_F\sqrt{p_x^2+p_y^2},
\label{spectrum}
\ee
with $v_F\approx 10^8$ cm/s being the Fermi velocity.
The solution of Eq. (\ref{be}) at arbitrary electric fields $\bm E(t)$ has the form \cite{Ignatov76,Mikhailov17a}
\be
f(\bm p,t)=
\int^{\infty}_0 e^{-\xi} f_0\big(\bm p- \bm p_0(t,\xi)\big) d \xi,
\label{solution}
\ee
where the vector
\be
\bm p_0(t,\xi)=-e\int_{t-\xi\tau}^t {\bm E}(t') dt'
\label{p0}
\ee
is determined by the external electric field. The induced electric current is then found by summation over occupied quantum states
\be
\bm j(t)=-\frac{e}{S}\sum_{\bm p\sigma v} \frac{\p E_{\bm p}}{\p \bm p} f(\bm p,t)
=
-\frac{e}{S}\sum_{\bm p\sigma v} \frac{\p E_{\bm p}}{\p \bm p} \int^{\infty}_0 e^{-\xi} f_0\big(\bm p- \bm p_0(t,\xi)\big) d \xi,\label{current}
\ee
where $S$ is the sample area, $\sigma$ and $v$ are the spin and valley quantum numbers. Substituting (\ref{p0}) and (\ref{spectrum}) into Eq. (\ref{current}) we get, after some algebra, the following expression for the electric current (a similar calculation can be found in \cite{Mikhailov17a})
\ba
\bm j(t)=
\frac{eg_sg_v\pi }{(2\pi\hbar)^2v_F}
\frac 1{4T}\int_{-\infty}^\infty \frac{E_F^2dE_F}{\cosh^2\left(\frac{\mu-E_F}{2T}\right)}
\int^{\infty}_0 e^{-\xi} d \xi
\bm P(t,\xi,E_F)N\big[P(t,\xi,E_F)\big].
\label{genresforj}
\ea
In Eq. (\ref{genresforj}), $g_s$ and $g_v$ are the spin and valley degeneracies, $g_s=g_v=2$,
\be
\bm P(t,\xi,E_F)=- \frac{\bm p_{0}(t,\xi)}{p_F},\ \ P(t,\xi,E_F)=|\bm P(t,\xi,E_F)|,
\label{vectorP}
\ee
$p_F=E_F/v_F$ is the Fermi momentum, and the function $N(x)$ is defined as
\be
N(x)=
\frac{1}{ \sqrt{1+x^2}}\ {_2F_1}\left(\frac 14,\frac 34;2; \left(\frac{2x}{1+x^2}\right)^2\right),
\ee
where ${_2F_1}(a,b;c;z)$ is the hypergeometric function. Equation (\ref{genresforj}) gives a general expression for the current, as a function of the chemical potential, temperature, and the scattering parameter $\tau$, at different time dependencies and polarizations of the external electric field.
Before moving further let us discuss the temperature dependence of the current (\ref{genresforj}). At zero temperature $T=0$ the factor with the $\cosh$ function is reduced to the delta-function,
\be
\lim_{T\to 0}\frac{1}{4T\cosh^2\left(\frac{\mu-E_F}{2T}\right)} =\delta(\mu-E_F).
\label{limit-delta}
\ee
At higher temperatures the current varies with $T$, but these changes are not very large. Indeed, in the quasiclassical theory the chemical potential should be considered to be large, to satisfy the condition $\hbar\omega\lesssim 2E_F$. For example, if $E_F$ is about $\sim 0.2$ eV or larger (this corresponds to electron densities larger than $\sim 3\times 10^{12}$ cm$^{-2}$), the condition $T\ll E_F$ is satisfied not only at the room temperature $T_0$ but also at $T$ exceeding $T_0$ by a factor $2-3$. Therefore, we can get accurate results assuming $T\ll E_F$ and using the following simplified expression for the current
\ba
\bm j(t)=
\frac{eg_sg_v\pi E_F^2}{(2\pi\hbar)^2v_F}
\int^{\infty}_0 e^{-\xi} d \xi
\bm P(t,\xi,E_F)N\big[P(t,\xi,E_F)\big].
\label{genresforjT0}
\ea
Here we have used the limit (\ref{limit-delta}) and replaced $\mu$ by a more convenient designation $E_F$. In the rest of the paper except Section \ref{sec:temperature} we will use the simplified expression (\ref{genresforjT0}). If Section \ref{sec:temperature} we analyze the finite temperature effects using a more general formula (\ref{genresforj}) and show that temperature does not substantially influence the $T=0$ results indeed.
Now we discuss results for the photoconductivity of graphene obtained from the general equation (\ref{genresforjT0}) in different limiting cases. We assume that the weak dc field is parallel to the $x$-axis, $\bm E_0\parallel\bm e_x$, and consider several possible polarizations of the strong ac electric field.
\subsection{Linearly polarized light: Photoconductivity versus polarization angle\label{sec:LinearPolariz}}
First, let us consider the case when the ac field is linearly polarized, and the polarization plane of the incident radiation constitutes an angle $\theta$ with respect to the $\bm E_0$ field. Then we have
\be
\bm E(t)=\bm e_x (E_0+E_\omega\cos\theta\sin\omega t)+\bm e_y E_\omega\sin\theta\sin\omega t.
\ee
According to the definition (\ref{vectorP}),
\be
\bm P(t,\xi)=\bm e_x \left({\cal F}_0\xi+{\cal F}_\omega\cos\theta\frac{\sin(\omega\tau\xi/2)}{\omega\tau/2}\sin(\omega t-\omega\tau\xi/2)\right)
+\bm e_y {\cal F}_\omega\sin\theta\frac{\sin(\omega\tau\xi/2)}{\omega \tau/2}\sin(\omega t-\omega\tau\xi/2),
\label{Ppolarization}
\ee
where we have introduced dimensionless quantities
\be
{\cal F}_0=\frac{e E_0\tau}{p_F},\ \ {\cal F}_\omega=\frac{eE_\omega\tau}{p_F},
\ee
characterizing the electric fields strength: the conditions ${\cal F}_{0,\omega}\ll 1$ and ${\cal F}_{0,\omega}\gtrsim 1$ correspond to the linear-response and nonlinear regimes, respectively \cite{Mikhailov07e}. Substituting (\ref{Ppolarization}) into (\ref{genresforjT0}) and averaging the resulting expression over time we obtain the absolute value of the direct current
\be
\left(\begin{array}{c}
j_x^0 \\ j_y^0 \\
\end{array}\right)=en_sv_F
\int^{\infty}_0 e^{-\xi} d \xi
\frac 1{2\pi}\int_{-\pi}^\pi dx
\left(\begin{array}{c}
{\cal F}_0\xi+Z\cos\theta\sin x \\ Z\sin\theta\sin x \\
\end{array}\right)
N\left(\sqrt{\left({\cal F}_0\xi+Z\cos\theta\sin x\right)^2
+ \left(Z\sin\theta\sin x\right)^2}\right),
\label{current-arbitrarytheta}
\ee
where
\be
n_s=\frac{g_sg_vE_F^2}{4\pi\hbar^2v_F^2}
\ee
is the density of electrons in graphene, and we have introduced a short notation
\be
Z\equiv Z({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\xi)={\cal F}_\omega\frac{\sin(\omega\tau\xi/2)}{\omega\tau/2}.\label{Z}
\ee
As seen from Eq. (\ref{current-arbitrarytheta}) the current flows both in $x$- and $y$-directions. In order to get compact expressions for components of the tensor $\sigma_{\alpha\beta}^{\rm ph}(\bm E_{\rm ac})$ it is convenient to introduce two functions
\be
{\cal A}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau)=\int^{\infty}_0 \xi e^{-\xi} d \xi
\frac 2{\pi}\int_{0}^{\pi/2} dx
N\left(Z\sin x\right),
\label{A}
\ee
\be
{\cal B}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau)=\int^{\infty}_0 \xi e^{-\xi} d \xi
\frac 2{\pi}\int_{0}^{\pi/2} dx \left(Z\sin x\right)^2
M\left(Z\sin x\right),
\label{B}
\ee
where the function $M(x)$ is related to the derivative of $N(x)$, $N'(x)=-xM(x)$, and is determined by the formula
\be
M(x)=\frac{1}{ (1+x^2)^{3/2}}\left[ {_2F_1}\left(\frac 14,\frac 34;2; \left(\frac{2x}{1+x^2}\right)^2\right)-\frac{3}{4}
\frac{1-x^2}{(1+x^2)^{2} } \ {_2F_1}\left(\frac 54,\frac 74;3; \left(\frac{2x}{1+x^2}\right)^2\right)\right].
\label{funcM}
\ee
Taking the linear-response limit $E_0\to 0$ we get the components of the tensor $\sigma_{\alpha\beta}^{\rm ph}(\bm E_{\rm ac})$:
\be
\frac{\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\theta)}{\sigma_0} =
{\cal A}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau)- \cos^2\theta
{\cal B}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau),
\label{Pcond-ThetaXX}
\ee
and
\be
\frac{\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\theta)}{\sigma_0} =
- \sin\theta\cos\theta
{\cal B}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau).
\label{Pcond-ThetaYX}
\ee
Figure \ref{fig:PCvsThetaXX} illustrates the $\theta$-dependence of the diagonal photoconductivity $\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\theta)$ at a few values of the electric field strength parameter ${\cal F}_\omega$ and the frequency parameter $\omega\tau$. First, one sees that $\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}$ is smaller than $\sigma_0$, i.e., the infinite uniform graphene layer is characterized by the \textit{negative} diagonal photoconductivity. Second, the influence of radiation on the conductive properties of the material can be very large: at a quite moderate value of the electric field parameter ${\cal F}_\omega\simeq 1$ the conductivity at low frequencies $\omega\tau\ll 1$ can be reduced by a factor of two, Figure \ref{fig:PCvsThetaXX}(a), black curve. At larger values of ${\cal F}_\omega$ the effect of radiation increases further: at ${\cal F}_\omega=5$ the conductivity changes by 80-90 \%, Figure \ref{fig:PCvsThetaXX}(b). Also, the effect is highly frequency dependent: it is highest at low frequencies $\omega\tau\lesssim 1$ and decreases at $\omega\tau\gg 1$. The maximal reduction of $\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}$ is seen when the dc and ac electric fields are parallel to each other, at $\theta=0$ or $\pi$. At $\theta=\pi/2$ the conductivity change $\delta\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}$ is weaker, and the difference between $\delta\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}(\theta=0)$ and $\delta\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}(\theta=\pi/2)$ is comparable with the value of $\delta\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}(\theta=\pi/2)$ itself, i.e., the effect is quite sensitive to the polarization of the wave.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaXX-Theta_Fw1.eps}
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaXX-Theta_Fw5.eps}
\caption{\label{fig:PCvsThetaXX} The photoconductivity (\ref{Pcond-ThetaXX}) as a function of $\theta$ at several values of $\omega\tau$ and at (a) the electric field parameter ${\cal F}_\omega=1$ and (b) ${\cal F}_\omega=5$. Blue and red arrows illustrate the mutual orientation of the dc and ac electric fields at different points of the $\theta$-axis.}
\end{figure}
The negative sign of the \textit{intraband} photoconductivity $\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\theta)$ is explained by the linear energy dispersion of graphene electrons. Under intense irradiation electrons get additional energy $E$ from the ac electric field occupying quantum states with $E>E_F$, see Appendix \ref{app:distrfun}. As a result, the ``effective mass'' of electrons $\sim E/v_F^2$ increases and the intraband (Drude) conductivity decreases.
Figure \ref{fig:PCvsThetaYX} shows the $\theta$-dependence of the off-diagonal photoconductivity $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\theta)$ at the same values of ${\cal F}_\omega$ and $\omega\tau$. Now, if the direction of the ac field is parallel or perpendicular to the direction of the dc field ($\theta=0$, $\pi$ or $\pi/2$), the $y$-component of the photocurrent $j_y^0$ vanishes. If $\theta$ lies between 0 and $\pi/2$, the current $j_y^0$ is negative, while if $\pi/2<\theta<\pi$, it is positive; see the directions of the resulting photocurrent in Figure \ref{fig:PCvsThetaYX} (black arrows). The dependence of the transverse photoconductivity $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}$ on ${\cal F}_\omega$ and $\omega\tau$ is less trivial and more interesting than that of $\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}$. First, one sees that the maximum ($\theta=3\pi/4$) low-frequency ($\omega\tau=0.1$) value of the transverse photoconductivity in moderate ac field ${\cal F}_\omega=1$ is \textit{larger} than in the strong field ${\cal F}_\omega=5$, $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega=1)\approx 0.13$ vs. $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega=5)\approx 0.107$, compare Figs. \ref{fig:PCvsThetaYX}(a) and \ref{fig:PCvsThetaYX}(b). Furthermore, the moderate-field value $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega=1)$ decreases, while the high-field value $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega=5)$ increases with the growing frequency: for example, $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega=1,\omega\tau=3)\approx 0.016$ while $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega=5,\omega\tau=3)\approx 0.15$. We investigate these interesting ${\cal F}_\omega$ and $\omega\tau$ dependencies further in Section \ref{sec:E&w-dependence} below.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaYX-Theta_Fw1.eps}
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaYX-Theta_Fw5.eps}
\caption{\label{fig:PCvsThetaYX} The photoconductivity (\ref{Pcond-ThetaYX}) as a function of $\theta$ at several values of $\omega\tau$ and at (a) the electric field parameter ${\cal F}_\omega=1$ and (b) ${\cal F}_\omega=5$. Blue and red arrows illustrate the mutual orientation of the dc and ac electric fields at different points of the $\theta$-axis. Black arrows show the direction of the wave induced photocurrent.}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Elliptically polarized light: Photoconductivity versus ellipticity\label{sec:ElliptPolariz}}
Now, let us consider the case when the ac field is elliptically polarized, with the polarization ellipse axes parallel to the $x$- and $y$-directions. The dc field $\bm E_0$ is assumed to be parallel to the $x$ axis as before. Then we write the electric field in the form
\be
\bm E(t)=\bm e_x (E_0+E_\omega\cos\delta\cos\omega t)+\bm e_y E_\omega\sin\delta\sin\omega t,
\ee
where $\delta$ is the ellipticity. The value of $\delta=0$ corresponds to the linear polarization of the ac field along the $x$-axis, $\delta=\pm\pi/4$ -- to the left and right circular polarization, and $\delta=\pi/2$ -- to the linear polarization along the $y$-axis. Then, following the same steps as before we get the time averaged electric current $\bm j_0 =\bm e_x j_x^0$, where
\be
\frac{ j_x^0}{en_sv_F} =
\int^{\infty}_0 e^{-\xi} d \xi
\frac 1{\pi}\int_{0}^\pi dx
\left({\cal F}_0\xi+Z\cos\delta \cos x\right)
N\left(\sqrt{\left({\cal F}_0\xi+Z\cos\delta\cos x\right)^2
+ \left(Z\sin\delta\sin x\right)^2}\right).
\ee
This results does not evidently depend on the sign of $\delta$, i.e., on the direction (left or right) of the elliptic polarization.
For any value of the ellipticity $\delta$ the current flows only in the direction of the dc electric field: the current component $j_y^0$ and the photoconductivity $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}$ equal zero in the considered case. In the limit $E_0\to 0$ we then get
\be
\frac{\sigma^{\rm ph}_{xx}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\delta)}{\sigma_0} =
{\cal C}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\delta)-\cos^2\delta
{\cal D}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\delta)
\label{Pcond-DeltaXX}
\ee
where we have introduced two new functions
\be
{\cal C}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\delta)=\int^{\infty}_0 \xi e^{-\xi} d \xi
\frac 2{\pi}\int_{0}^{\pi/2} dx
N\left(\sqrt{\left(Z\cos\delta\sin x\right)^2
+ \left(Z\sin\delta\cos x\right)^2}\right),
\label{C}
\ee
\be
{\cal D}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\delta)=\int^{\infty}_0 \xi e^{-\xi} d \xi
\frac 2{\pi}\int_{0}^{\pi/2} dx (Z\sin x)^2
M\left(\sqrt{\left(Z\cos\delta\sin x\right)^2
+ \left(Z\sin\delta\cos x\right)^2}\right).
\label{D}
\ee
Comparing the definitions (\ref{C})--(\ref{D}) and (\ref{A})--(\ref{B}) we see that the following identities are valid:
\be
{\cal C}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,0)={\cal C}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\pi/2)={\cal A}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau),\ \
{\cal D}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,0)={\cal B}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau).
\ee
Consequently, equation (\ref{Pcond-DeltaXX}) gives the same result at $\delta=0$ and $\delta=\pi/2$ as equation (\ref{Pcond-ThetaXX}) at $\theta=0$ and $\theta=\pi/2$. In the circular polarization case $\delta=\pi/4$ the argument of the functions $N$ and $M$ in Eqs. (\ref{C})--(\ref{D}) does not depend on $x$, the integral over $dx$ can be taken, and the formulas (\ref{C})--(\ref{D}) are simplified:
\be
{\cal C}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\pi/4)=
\int^{\infty}_0 \xi e^{-\xi} d \xi
N\left(\frac{Z}{\sqrt{2}}\right)=\int^{\infty}_0 \xi e^{-\xi} N\left(\frac{{\cal F}_\omega}{\sqrt{2}} \frac{\sin(\omega\tau\xi/2)}{\omega \tau/2}\right) d \xi ,
\label{Cd}
\ee
\be
{\cal D}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\pi/4)=
\frac 12\int^{\infty}_0 \xi e^{-\xi} Z^2 M\left(\frac{Z}{\sqrt{2}}\right)d \xi
=\frac 12{\cal F}_\omega^2 \int^{\infty}_0 \xi e^{-\xi} \left(\frac{\sin(\omega\tau\xi/2)}{\omega \tau/2}\right)^2M\left(\frac{{\cal F}_\omega}{\sqrt{2}} \frac{\sin(\omega\tau\xi/2)}{\omega \tau/2}\right) d \xi .
\label{Dd}
\ee
Figure \ref{fig:PCvsDeltaXX} shows the photoconductivity $\sigma^{\rm ph}_{xx}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\delta)$ as a function of the ellipticity $\delta$ in the moderate (${\cal F}_\omega=1$) and strong (${\cal F}_\omega=5$) electric fields at a few values of $\omega\tau$. Qualitatively, the dependencies shown in Figure \ref{fig:PCvsDeltaXX} are similar to those on Figure \ref{fig:PCvsThetaXX}: the photoconductivity is quite strong already in moderate electric fields, is very sensitive to the ellipticity, and the influence of radiation of the conductivity is more essential at large electric fields and low frequencies.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaXX-Delta_Fw1.eps}
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaXX-Delta_Fw5.eps}
\caption{\label{fig:PCvsDeltaXX} The photoconductivity (\ref{Pcond-DeltaXX}) as a function of the ellipticity $\delta$ at several values of $\omega\tau$ and at (a) the electric field parameter ${\cal F}_\omega=1$ and (b) ${\cal F}_\omega=5$. The left and right edges of the plot, $\delta=0$ and $\delta=\pi/2$, correspond to linear polarizations of radiation along the $x$- and $y$-axis respectively. The central dashed line at $\delta=\pi/4$ refers to the circular polarization of radiation. }
\end{figure}
\subsection{Electric field and frequency dependence of the photoconductivity\label{sec:E&w-dependence}}
Now we analyze the photoconductivity dependencies on the electric field and frequency parameters ${\cal F}_\omega$ and $\omega\tau$. We consider several typical cases.
\subsubsection{Linear polarization, parallel orientation of the dc and ac fields; diagonal photoconductivity}
Here we consider the case of the linearly polarized radiation with the parallel polarizations of the dc and ac electric fields, $\delta=0$, $\theta=0$, $\bm E_0\parallel\bm E_\omega$. As we have seen in Section \ref{sec:LinearPolariz}, the photoconductivity effect is the largest in this case. Equation (\ref{Pcond-ThetaXX}) gives in this limit
\be
\frac{\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,0)}{\sigma_0} =
{\cal A}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau)-
{\cal B}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau) \equiv
\frac{\sigma_0-\delta \sigma_{xx}^{\parallel}}{\sigma_0}.
\label{Pcond-ThetaXX-parallel}
\ee
Here we introduce the difference $\delta \sigma_{xx}^{\parallel}=\sigma_0-\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,0)$, to emphasize how the conductivity changes under the influence of radiation. Since the photoconductivity of graphene is negative, the function $\delta \sigma_{xx}^{\parallel}$ is larger than zero; the superscript $\parallel$ reminds that we are dealing with the parallel orientation of the dc and ac fields.
Figure \ref{fig:Spar}(a) shows the field dependence of the function $\delta \sigma_{xx}^{\parallel}$ defined by Eq. (\ref{Pcond-ThetaXX-parallel}). When the field parameter ${\cal F}_\omega$ grows the function $\delta \sigma_{xx}^{\parallel}$ first quickly increases and then saturates. The saturation level of $\delta \sigma_{xx}^{\parallel}$ can be larger than $\sim 0.95\sigma_0$ at low frequencies $\omega\tau\lesssim 0.1$ and large ac electric fields ${\cal F}_\omega\gtrsim 10$. The boundary between the strong-growth and saturation intervals on the field axis lies at ${\cal F}_\omega\simeq 1$ at $\omega\tau\lesssim 1$ and at ${\cal F}_\omega\simeq\omega\tau$ at $\omega\tau\gtrsim 1$. Figure \ref{fig:Spar}(b) illustrates the frequency dependence of $\delta \sigma_{xx}^{\parallel}$. It falls down quite quickly with $\omega\tau$ and decreases by a factor of order two at $\omega\tau\simeq {\cal F}_\omega$.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaXXpar-Fw.eps}
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaXXpar-wt.eps}
\caption{\label{fig:Spar} The photoconductivity change $\delta \sigma_{xx}^{\parallel}$, defined by Eq. (\ref{Pcond-ThetaXX-parallel}), as a function of (a) the electric field parameter ${\cal F}_\omega$ at fixed values of $\omega\tau$, and (b) the frequency parameter $\omega\tau$ at fixed values of ${\cal F}_\omega$.}
\end{figure}
\subsubsection{Linear polarization, orthogonal orientation of the dc and ac fields; diagonal photoconductivity}
Now we consider the case of perpendicular polarizations, $\delta=\pi/2$, $\theta=\pi/2$, $\bm E_0\parallel\bm e_x\perp \bm E_\omega\parallel\bm e_y$. Then we get from equation (\ref{Pcond-ThetaXX})
\be
\frac{\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\pi/2)}{\sigma_0} =
{\cal A}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau)\equiv
\frac{\sigma_0-\delta \sigma_{xx}^{\perp}}{\sigma_0},
\label{Pcond-ThetaXX-perpendicular}
\ee
Figures \ref{fig:Sper}(a,b) show the field and frequency dependencies of the function $\delta \sigma_{xx}^{\perp}$ defined by Eq. (\ref{Pcond-ThetaXX-perpendicular}). The general trends of these dependencies is similar to those of the function $\delta \sigma_{xx}^{\parallel}$, but quantitatively, the conductivity change is weaker. The growth of $\delta \sigma_{xx}^{\perp}$ with the field is slower, Figure \ref{fig:Sper}(a), and its decrease with $\omega\tau$ is faster, Figure \ref{fig:Sper}(b), than for the parallel-polarization function $\delta \sigma_{xx}^{\parallel}$, Figure \ref{fig:Spar}.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaXXper-Fw.eps}
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaXXper-wt.eps}
\caption{\label{fig:Sper} The photoconductivity change $\delta \sigma_{xx}^{\perp}$ defined by Eq. (\ref{Pcond-ThetaXX-perpendicular}), as a function of (a) the electric field parameter ${\cal F}_\omega$ at fixed values of $\omega\tau$, and (b) the frequency parameter $\omega\tau$ at fixed values of ${\cal F}_\omega$.}
\end{figure}
\subsubsection{Linear polarization, off-diagonal photoconductivity}
The off-diagonal conductivity $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}$ is determined by Eq. (\ref{Pcond-ThetaYX}). The maximum values of $|\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}|$ are reached at $\theta=\pi/2\pm \pi/4$, see Figure \ref{fig:PCvsThetaYX}, and are equal to
\be
\frac{\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\pi/2\pm \pi/4)}{\sigma_0} =
\pm\frac 12
{\cal B}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau).
\label{PcondYX-max}
\ee
Figures \ref{fig:Syx}(a,b) show the electric field and frequency dependencies of the maximal off-diagonal photoconductivity (\ref{PcondYX-max}) at $\theta=3\pi/4$. These dependencies substantially differ from those of the diagonal photoconductivity. Both the field and frequency dependencies are non-monotonic and have a maximum. For any value of the frequency parameter, the photoconductivity $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}$ first grow with the electric field, Figure \ref{fig:Syx}(a), reaches a maximum and then decreases. The maximum is at ${\cal F}_\omega\simeq 1$ for small frequencies $\omega\tau\lesssim 1$ and then approximately follows $\sim 2\omega\tau$ when the frequency increases. The frequency dependence also demonstrates a maximum of $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}$ at $\omega\tau\simeq {\cal F}_\omega/2$, Figure \ref{fig:Syx}(b). The absolute value of $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}$ in the maximum is about $0.16$, in units of $\sigma_0$. Thus, the irradiation of graphene by a linearly polarized electromagnetic wave at the angle $\pi/4$ to the direction of the dc current may substantially influence the direction of the current flow. For example, if $\omega\tau=0.1$ and $\theta=3\pi/4$, the current deviates from the $x$-direction by $12$ and $25$ degrees at ${\cal F}_\omega=1$ and 5 respectively, see Figures \ref{fig:PCvsThetaXX} and \ref{fig:PCvsThetaYX}. At larger frequencies the deviations are smaller: at $\omega\tau=3$ the corresponding numbers are 9 and 15 degrees (at ${\cal F}_\omega=1$ and 5).
\begin{figure}[ht]
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaYX-Fw.eps}
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaYX-wt.eps}
\caption{\label{fig:Syx} The photoconductivity $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}$ defined by Eq. (\ref{PcondYX-max}), at $\theta=3\pi/4$, as a function of (a) the electric field parameter ${\cal F}_\omega$ at fixed values of $\omega\tau$, and (b) the frequency parameter $\omega\tau$ at fixed values of ${\cal F}_\omega$.}
\end{figure}
Physically, non-monotonic behavior of $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}$ is explained by the competition of two factors. At low ac electric fields, the electron distribution function is isotropic, see Figure \ref{fig:distrfunc}(a) in Appendix \ref{app:distrfun}, and close to the equilibrium one: the current $j_y$ and the transverse photoconductivity $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}$ are small. When the field parameter ${\cal F}_\omega$ increases, the anisotropy degree increases too, Figure \ref{fig:distrfunc}(b,c,d), and $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}$ grows. However, at large values ${\cal F}_\omega\gg 1$ the occupation by electrons of the high-energy states leads to the growth of their ``effective mass'' $E/v_F^2$, and $\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}$ slowly falls down similar to $\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}$, as was discussed in Section \ref{sec:LinearPolariz}.
\subsubsection{Circular polarization of the ac field; diagonal photoconductivity}
Finally we show results for the field and frequency dependencies of the diagonal photoconductivity $\delta\sigma_{xx}^{\ocircle}$ at the circular polarization of the incident radiation. In this case $\delta=\pi/4$ and we have from Eq. (\ref{Pcond-DeltaXX})
\be
\frac{\sigma^{\rm ph}_{xx}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\pi/4)}{\sigma_0} =
{\cal C}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\pi/4)-\frac 12
{\cal D}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\pi/4)\equiv \frac{\sigma_0-\delta\sigma^{\ocircle}_{xx} }{\sigma_0}.
\label{Pcond-DeltaXX-circular}
\ee
Figures \ref{fig:Scirc}(a) and (b) show the field and frequency dependencies of the photoconductivity $\delta\sigma^{\ocircle}_{xx}$ defined by Eq. (\ref{Pcond-DeltaXX-circular}). Qualitatively, the dependencies shown here are similar to those obtained for $\delta\sigma^{\parallel}_{xx}$, Figure \ref{fig:Spar}, and $\delta\sigma^{\perp}_{xx}$, Figure \ref{fig:Sper}, but there is a quantitative difference. Altogether, Figures \ref{fig:Spar} -- \ref{fig:Scirc} provide a complete picture of the field and frequency dependencies of the photoconductivity at different polarizations of the incident electromagnetic waves.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaXXcirc-Fw.eps}
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaXXcirc-wt.eps}
\caption{\label{fig:Scirc} The photoconductivity change $\delta\sigma^{\ocircle}_{xx}$ defined by Eq. (\ref{Pcond-DeltaXX-circular}) as a function of (a) the electric field parameter ${\cal F}_\omega$ at fixed values of $\omega\tau$, and (b) the frequency parameter $\omega\tau$ at fixed values of ${\cal F}_\omega$. }
\end{figure}
\subsection{Comparison with the perturbation theory\label{sec:perturb-expansion}}
The perturbation theory results give a correction to the material conductivity proportional to the squared electric field. As seen from Figures \ref{fig:Spar}(a) -- \ref{fig:Scirc}(a), the exact result deviates from the ${\cal F}_\omega^2$ dependence at rather low values of the electric field parameter ${\cal F}_\omega$. It makes sense to compare quantitatively results of the third-order perturbation theory \cite{Mikhailov16a} with the exact results obtained here.
In the limit of low electric fields we expand the functions ${\cal A}$ -- ${\cal D}$ in equations (\ref{A}) -- (\ref{B}) and (\ref{C}) -- (\ref{D}) in powers of ${\cal F}_\omega$ up to the second order $\sim {\cal F}_\omega^2$. Taking into account that the first terms of Taylor's expansion of the functions $N(x)$ and $M(x)$ are $N\left( x\right)=1-x^2/8+\dots$ and $M(x)= 1/4+\dots$ and taking the integrals over $dx$ and $d\xi$ analytically, we find that the functions ${\cal C}$ and ${\cal D}$ do not depend on $\delta$ in the considered limit, all four functions are related to each other, ${\cal A}={\cal C}$, ${\cal B}={\cal D}$, ${\cal A}=1-{\cal B}/2$, and
\be
{\cal A}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau)\approx
1 -\frac{{\cal F}_\omega^2}{8}\frac{3+(\omega\tau)^2}{(1+(\omega\tau)^2)^2}+O\left({\cal F}_\omega^4\right).
\ee
This gives the following results for the components of the photoconductivity tensor in the second order in ${\cal F}_\omega$:
\be
\frac{\sigma_{xx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\theta)}{\sigma_0} =
1 -\frac{{\cal F}_\omega^2}{8}\frac{3+(\omega\tau)^2}{(1+(\omega\tau)^2)^2}
(1+2 \cos^2\theta)+O\left({\cal F}_\omega^4\right),
\label{SigmaXXasym}
\ee
\be
\frac{\sigma_{yx}^{\rm ph}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\theta)}{\sigma_0} =
- \frac {{\cal F}_\omega^2}8\frac{3+(\omega\tau)^2}{(1+(\omega\tau)^2)^2}
(2\sin\theta\cos\theta )+O\left({\cal F}_\omega^4\right);
\label{SigmaYXasym}
\ee
the asymptote of $\sigma^{\rm ph}_{xx}({\cal F}_\omega,\omega\tau,\delta)$ has the same form as (\ref{SigmaXXasym}), but with $\theta$ replaced by $\delta$. The results (\ref{SigmaXXasym}) -- (\ref{SigmaYXasym}) can be also derived from the general formulas of the third-order perturbation theory \cite{Mikhailov16a}, see Appendix \ref{app:perturbtheory}.
In Figure \ref{fig:Asy} we compare exact, nonperturbative theory curves with the low-field asymptotes (\ref{SigmaXXasym}) and (\ref{SigmaYXasym}). At low fields, roughly corresponding to the interval $0<{\cal F}_\omega\lesssim \omega\tau/2$, the exact and approximate curves are close to each other. Then, in the interval $\omega\tau/2\lesssim{\cal F}_\omega\lesssim \omega\tau$ the photoconductivities $\delta\sigma^{\parallel}_{xx}$ and $\sigma^{\rm ph}_{yx}$ calculated from exact formulas grow faster than the ${\cal F}_\omega^2$-approximations. Finally, at ${\cal F}_\omega\gtrsim \omega\tau$, the exact formulas exhibit saturation of $\delta\sigma^{\parallel}_{xx}$ and a tendency to the reduction of $\sigma^{\rm ph}_{yx}$, and the asymptotic formulas (\ref{SigmaXXasym}) and (\ref{SigmaYXasym}) become fully unreliable. In the limit of low frequencies $\omega\tau\lesssim 1$ the frequency $\omega$ should be replaced by $1/\tau$ in these estimates. The applicability of the third-order perturbation theory is thus restricted by the condition
\be
\frac{eE_\omega\tau}{\max\{1,\omega\tau\} p_F}\lesssim \frac 12.
\label{applicability}
\ee
If, for example, the relaxation time $\tau\simeq 1$ ps, the frequency $f\simeq 1$ THz, and the electron density is $n_s\simeq 10^{11}$ cm$^{-2}$, the conditions $\omega\tau\gg 1$ and $\hbar\omega\lesssim 2E_F$ are satisfied, and the formula (\ref{applicability}) restricts the value of the ac electric field by $E_\omega\simeq 2.2$ kV/cm. At higher fields the nonperturbative theory should be applied.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaXXpar-Fw_asy.eps}
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaYX-Fw_asy.eps}
\caption{\label{fig:Asy} Comparison of exact (thick dashed or dot-dashed curves) and asymptotic (thin solid curves) formulas for the electric field dependencies of the photoconductivities (a) $\delta\sigma^{\parallel}_{xx}$ and (b) $\sigma^{\rm ph}_{yx}$ at several values of $\omega\tau$. }
\end{figure}
\subsection{Influence of temperature\label{sec:temperature}}
So far we have used the simplified expression for the radiation induced current (\ref{genresforjT0}) which is valid at $T=0$. At a finite temperature $T>0$ any photoconductivity discussed above can be calculated using the relation
\ba
\sigma\left(\mu,T\right)=
\frac 1{4T}\int_{-\infty}^\infty \frac{dE_F}{\cosh^2\left(\frac{\mu-E_F}{2T}\right)} \sigma\left(E_F,0\right)
\ea
between the finite-$T$ and zero-$T$ response functions; here $\mu$ is the chemical potential at $T\neq 0$. As we have mentioned in Section \ref{sec:GenFormulas} our results should not be very sensitive to $T$ since within the quasiclassical theory the case of intrinsic graphene ($E_F\approx 0$) is excluded. Figure \ref{fig:Scirc-Tmu} confirms this statement. It shows, as a representative example, the temperature dependence of the conductivity change $\delta\sigma^{\ocircle}_{xx}$, induced by a circularly polarized radiation, as a function of $T/\mu$ at several values of the electric field strength and frequency. One sees that $\delta\sigma^{\ocircle}_{xx}$ varies with the temperature by only a few percent when the parameter $T/\mu$ grows from zero up to $T/\mu=0.3$. At the electron density $\simeq 10^{12}-10^{13}$ cm$^{-2}$ the value of $T\approx 0.3 \mu$ corresponds to $\simeq 405-1280$ K. Therefore all our results shown in previous Sections give reliable estimates of the discussed physical effects both at room temperature $T_0$ and in the case when the electron gas in graphene is heated by the radiation up to $T\simeq (2-4)T_0$.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{SigmaXXcirc-Tmu.eps}
\caption{\label{fig:Scirc-Tmu} Temperature dependence of $\delta\sigma^{\ocircle}_{xx}$ at several values of ${\cal F}_\omega$ and $\omega\tau$. $\mu$ is the chemical potential.}
\end{figure}
\section{Summary and conclusions\label{sec:summary}}
To summarize, we have developed a nonperturbative theory of graphene photoconductivity applicable at low ($\hbar\omega\lesssim 2E_F$) frequencies which, dependent on the electron density in the material, may cover the range from microwave up to near-infrared frequencies. We have investigated the dependencies of the photoconductivity tensor on all relevant physical parameters (electric field strength, frequency, temperature, material properties, etc.), and found the applicability boundaries of the third-order perturbation theory. We have shown that the photoconductivity effect strongly depends on the radiation frequency, being the largest at $\omega\tau\lesssim 1$, and that the conductivity change caused by the irradiation can be as large as $80-90$\% in quite moderate electric fields of order of kV/cm. We have also shown that the effect is very sensitive to the direction and/or the ellipticity of the electric field polarization of the incident electromagnetic radiation. The predicted dependencies can be used for detection of THz, far- and mid-infrared radiation. Our findings may be interesting for further fundamental experimental studies of the nonlinear electrodynamic effects in graphene, as well as for its applications in the field of nonlinear terahertz and infrared photonics and optoelectronics.
\begin{acknowledgments}
This work has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme Graphene Core 3 under Grant Agreement No. 881603.
\end{acknowledgments}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 4,012 |
Q: Why resizing dataset images before CNN since it stretches them? I initialize my dataset using the following function (simplified):
WIDTH = ...
HEIGHT = ...
def load_data(dataset_path):
images = []
labels = []
for all_images:
image = cv2.imread(pimage_path)
image = cv2.resize(image, (WIDTH, HEIGHT)) #???
labels.add(corresponding_label)
return (np.array(images).reshape(-1, WIDTH, HEIGHT, 3) / 255, np.array(labels))
In the tutorials I watched, people resize the input images to (WIDTH, HEIGHT). But this proceeds to stretch the images. I don't understand why we have to do that, because in the model I'm using the input images are applied a convolution. So I tried to not resize the input images but I got an error during the reshape process at the end of my function.
What am I missing?
A: You aren't limited to stretching the image, perhaps you could either crop the image or add a bufferzone with a consistent color, although if you can afford to crop the images that'd be more convenient but still you can just fill the rest of the space with a fixed color, the model would not care less.
A: What kind of error did you get when reshaping? Chances are that if you do not reshape the image you cannot later on resize the numpy array to WIDTH, HEIGHT. In that case, you must change the value of WIDTH and HEIGHT.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 7,818 |
Q: Найдите флаг Python Найдите флаг
Найти все вхождения строки формата "flag{[0-9a-f]{32}}" в файле "input.txt"
Примеры
Входные данные
flag{5c4d49102af8d43d9802cabd6b8a3619}
flag
Результат работы
flag{5c4d49102af8d43d9802cabd6b8a3619}
написал код, но не могу понять в чем проблема.
import re
with open('input.txt') as fh:
matches = re.findall(r'flag\{[0-9a-f]{32}\}', fh.read())
for m in matches:
print(m.group(0))
Предлагали прописать путь до тхт, но файл отправляется на сайт
A: Вы объявили matches внутри with, чтобы ваш код сработал.
ДОПОЛНЕНИЕ
Так как re.findall возвращает список строк, то m внутри цикла for является строкой ,а в Python 3.x строка не имеет метода group, по этому ваш код не сработает.
Сработает так:
import re
with open('input.txt') as fh:
matches = re.findall(r'flag\{[0-9a-f]{32}\}', fh.read())
for m in matches:
print(m)
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 5,798 |
Новоша́хтинск — город в Ростовской области России. Образует городской округ. Согласно принятому правительством РФ в 2019 году Индексу качества городской среды город Новошахтинск, по показателю данного индекса, является самым худшим городом России среди городов с населением от 100 тыс. до 250 тыс. человек, находящиеся в условно комфортном климате.
География
Город расположен на реке Малый Несветай, на западе Ростовской области, на границе с Украиной (Луганская область), в 80 км к северо-западу от Ростова-на-Дону.
История
Первое упоминание о здешнем каменном угле относится к 1696 году, когда крестьянин Григорий Капустин, действуя во исполнение указа императора Петра I, исследовал район долины реки Кондрючья и обнаружил выходящие на поверхность пласты угля. Примерно с тех пор начинается разработка Донецкого угольного бассейна.
С 1840 по 1910 год на месте нынешнего города возникают посёлки и угольные копи, первый из которых был построен купцом первой гильдии Семёном Николаевичем Кошкиным. В 1910 году все они объединяются в один: рудник «Несветай».
В это время предпринимателями велось интенсивное строительство мелких шахт. В 1909 году здесь была введена в эксплуатацию первая шахта. В 1913 году, с появлением на руднике Николая Парамонова, сына ростовского миллионера, добыча угля значительно расширилась. Он заложил первые пять крупных шахт, проложил железнодорожную ветку Несветай — Горная, построил первые 48 каменных казарм для рабочих и 4 коттеджа для администрации.
Несмотря на бедствия Первой мировой войны, революции и Гражданской войны, угольная промышленность в 1920-е годы по-прежнему продолжает развиваться, а вместе с ней растёт и посёлок. В 1925 году здесь разбивают городской парк, в котором открываются читальный павильон и летний закрытый кинозал.
31 января 1939 года указом Президиума Верховного совета СССР поселки Молотовский и Коминтерновский объединены в один населённый пункт, который отнесен к разряду городов с присвоением названия — Новошахтинск.
С 23 июля 1942 по 13 февраля 1943 года город находится под немецкой оккупацией. Перед приходом германской армии шахты были затоплены, а местные жители частично эвакуированы. Нацисты организовали в городе лагерь для военнопленных, которые выполняли тяжёлые работы.
После освобождения города советскими войсками здесь в течение четырёх месяцев располагался штаб Южного фронта.
После окончания боевых действий город пребывал в бедственном состоянии: множество зданий и строений были разрушены, а шахты по-прежнему были затоплены.
В 60-е, 70-е в Новошахтинске вводились в строй углеперерабатывающие и предприятия стройиндустрии, горпромкомбинат, молочный и хлебный заводы, швейная фабрика, филиалы ростовских оборонных заводов.
В 2003 году все шахты города были закрыты в связи с упадком угольной промышленности на Дону, а также крупной аварией на шахте «Западной».
Население
Планировка города
Микрорайоны:
Антиповка,
Горького,
Западный,
Кировка,
Новая-Соколовка,
Соколовка,
ЖБК,
Новый микрорайон,
Центр,
Юбилейный,
Южный,
Радио,
Лебедева,
Весёлый.
Михайловка
Стройбюро
Посёлки:
Красный,
Самбек,
Соколово-Кундрюченский,
Несветаевский.
Бугултай.
Экономика
Промышленность
Во времена СССР Новошахтинск являлся крупным центром угольной промышленности Ростовской области. После 1991 года угледобыча в городе начала сокращаться, а потом прекратилась в связи с закрытием всех шахт в 2003 году.
ОП ЗАО "Корпорация «Глория Джинс», создавшая в городе производство на базе Швейной фабрики № 6, является лидером швейного производства города. Предприятие специализируется на пошиве джинсовой одежды из давальческого сырья для ЗАО "Корпорация «Глория Джинс».
Второе, согласно данным на середину 2021 года, по обороту предприятие города агрокомбинат «Донской», занимающееся консервацией рыбы.
Третье крупное промышленное предприятие — ООО «Вагондормаш», занимающееся восстановлением железнодорожных локомотивов, трамвайных вагонов и других средств подвижного состава.
Транспорт
Через город проходят две автомагистрали общегосударственного значения: Ростов-на-Дону — Киев и Москва — Баку.
Автотрасса Ростов — Киев на участке Ростов — Новошахтинск имеет протяжённость 80 км, пересекается государственной российско-украинской границей на расстоянии 8 км от г. Новошахтинска. Наличие таможенного перехода делает город важнейшим перевалочным пунктом на пути следования грузов из стран Европы и Турции в европейскую часть России. Железнодорожная станция Несветай на частично разобранной ветке Горная — Должанская.
Социальная сфера
19 образовательных школ, 7 учреждений дополнительного образования, 5 учреждений социальной защиты, 31 детский сад
Филиалы Шахтинского регионального колледжа топлива и энергетики, Южного федерального университета, Московского нового юридического института, Южно-Российского государственного технического университета
Два стадиона
Музыкальная школа, художественная школа, школа искусств и центр развития творчества детей и юношества
Новошахтинский драматический театр
Новошахтинский историко-краеведческий музей
Кинотеатр «Калейдоскоп»
Средства массовой информации
Муниципальная общественно-политическая газета «Знамя шахтёра» (с приложением «Деловой Новошахтинск»).
Информационный портал города Новошахтинска «Знаменка.инфо»
Муниципальная телекомпания «Несветай»
Радиостанция «Love Radio» 101,0 FM
Радиостанция «Дорожное радио Новошахтинска» 107,7 FM
Новостной портал города Новошахтинска www.go61.ru
Региональная газета для школьников и молодёжи «Классная переменка»
Местные достопримечательности
Новошахтинский драматический театр, основан в 2006 году.
Памятник защитникам отечества в Великой войне — мемориал «Раненый солдат».
Памятник шахтёру.
Памятник автомобилю.
Стела около администрации шахты Горького.
Фонтан со скульптурой женщины в парке города. (снесен)
Памятник природы урочище Золотая криница. Площадь урочища составляет 5,5 га, создано в декабре 1977 года для сохранения источника с пресной водой.
Памятник В. И. Ленину перед бывшим зданием Горкома.
Храм Донской иконы Божией Матери (2004).
Храм архистратига Михаила.
Церковь Покрова Пресвятой Богородицы.
Церковь Николая Чудотворца.
Почётные граждане города
Белый, Михаил Михайлович (род. 1948) — врач-хирург, онколог, депутат Новошахтинской городской думы, звание «Почетный гражданин г. Новошахтинска» присвоено в 2009 г.
Воинов, Фёдор Матвеевич (род. 1926) — шахтёр, кавалер орденов Октябрьской революции, Трудового Красного Знамени, Отечественной войны 1-й и 2-й степени, знака «Шахтёрская слава» трёх степеней, звание «Почетный гражданин г. Новошахтинска» присвоено в 1977 г.
Дьяков, Николай Васильевич (род. 1941) — партийный и хозяйственный деятель, заслуженный работник коммунального хозяйства Ростовской области, руководитель исполкома Новошахтинского местного отделения Всероссийской политической партии «Единая Россия» (2005—2009), звание «Почетный гражданин г. Новошахтинска» присвоено в 2009 г.
Короцько, Василий Максимович (род. 1898) — заслуженный врач Российской Федерации, звание «Почетный гражданин г. Новошахтинска» присвоено в 1967 г.
Мешков, Пётр Илларионович (1899—1979) — шахтёр, участник гражданской войны, инструктор политотдела Донбасса на Несветае, на руднике 3-го Коминтерна, профсоюзный деятель, звание «Почетный гражданин г. Новошахтинска» присвоено в 1977 г.
Матвеев, Анатолий Васильевич (род. 1927) — почетный работник топливно-энергетического комплекса, ветеран труда, награждён орденами Ленина, Октябрьской революции, Трудового Красного Знамени, орденом «Знак Почёта», полный кавалер знака «Шахтёрского слава», звание «Почетный гражданин г. Новошахтинска» присвоено в 1999 г.
Остапенко, Андрей Андреевич (род. 1919) — отличник здравоохранения, заслуженный врач РСФСР, кандидат медицинских наук, звание «Почетный гражданин г. Новошахтинска» присвоено в 1979 г.
Петров, Валентин Николаевич (род. 1924) — педагог, депутат Новошахтинского городского Совета, звание «Почетный гражданин г. Новошахтинска» присвоено в 2001 г.
Пичугин, Иван Иванович (род. 1903) — шахтостроитель, звание «Почетный гражданин г. Новошахтинск» присвоено в 1967 г.
Посыльный, Иван Дмитриевич (род. 1922) — Герой Социалистического Труда, Заслуженный шахтёр Российской Федерации.
Пушкаренко, Александр Иосифович (род.1906) — участник Великой Отечественной войны, удостоен многих боевых наград, ветеран педагогического труда, звание «Почетный гражданин г. Новошахтинск» присвоено в 1977 г.
Сухорукова, Екатерина Егоровна (род. 1941) — педагог, директор детского дома № 1 г. Новошахтинск (1986—2005), заслуженный учитель РФ, кавалер ордена Трудового Красного Знамени.
Синкиенко, Николай Иванович (род. 1934) — партийный, руководящий работник, звание «Почетный гражданин г. Новошахтинска» присвоено в 1999 г.
Ткаченко, Виктор Гаврилович (род. 1946) — шахтёр, руководящий работник, звание «Почетный гражданин г. Новошахтинска» присвоено в 2004 г.
Толокнев, Виктор Николаевич (род. 1936) — директор шахты «Степановская» в 1975—2001 гг., заслуженный работник угольной промышленности РФ, награждён орденом Трудового Красного Знамени, орденом «Знак Почёта», полный кавалер знака «Шахтёрского слава».
Торич, Леонид Михайлович (род. 1913) — художник-скульптор, член Союза художников СССР, звание «Почетный гражданин г. Новошахтинска» присвоено в 1981 году.
Франковский, Казимир Станиславович (род 1927) — шахтёр, почётный работник топливно-энергетического комплекса, награждён орденами Ленина, Октябрьской революции, Трудового красного Знамени, «Знак почёта», знаками «Шахтёрская слава» трёх степеней, звание «Почетный гражданин г. Новошахтинска» присвоено в 1998 г.
Примечания
Ссылки
Официальный сайт города Новошахтинска
Новошахтинск в энциклопедии «Мой город»
Описание герба Новошахтинска
Населённые пункты Ростовской области
Города Ростовской области
Города, основанные в XX веке
Переименованные населённые пункты России
Городские округа Ростовской области | {
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Big Magic ropes in actors Varun Badola and Rajeshwari Sachdev
They will act as Mentors for the Big Fame Star property and actress Sara Khan will play host
Big Magic, Reliance Broadcast Network's regional general entertainment channel for the Hindi-speaking heartland of Central India, has roped in popular television actors Varun Badola and Rajeshwari Sachdev as mentors for its upcoming property, Big Fame Star. Joining them will be television actress Sara Khan who will be seen hosting the show on Big Magic. The youth talent hunt, which will penetrate to the grassroot level to present a platform to superstar aspirants, kicked off auditions across 15 markets in Uttar Pradesh on May 4 and is all set to witness the first phase of mega auditions among shortlisted contestants from Moradabad, Saharanpur and Meerut on May 9, 2013.
As mentors, Badola and Sachdev will join Anup Soni and Tisca Chopra who are judges on the show. During the auditions, the mentor-duo will be responsible for grooming and training the contestants, as well as judging them thereafter in order to close in on the finalists who will feature on Big Fame Star. Sara Khan, who joins the quartet as host for the show, will be seen guiding the contestants as their friend and support.
Following the first phase of mega auditions will be two more phases wherein more contestants will be selected from 12 additional markets across Uttar Pradesh – with Aligarh being the next city to witness their youth's rise to fame. By the time the three phases of auditions draw to a close, the mentors will have shortlisted 16 contestants who will be able to take their dreams of superstardom to another level through weekly challenges and rounds that will be featured on Big Fame Star.
Sunil Kumaran, Business Head – Language TV, Reliance Broadcast Network, said, "Big Fame Star is a multi-faceted talent hunt which aims to penetrate to the deepest level to unearth some of the most gifted youth in Uttar Pradesh."
This move ensures the best programming mix to its audiences, as Big Magic gears up for phase II of digitisation with RBNL's recently launched consumer awareness campaign 'Samajdhari se Chune, Apna Set Top Box'. After an extremely successful roll-out of the campaign across the four metros, it now extends across 38 cities in DAS phase II. The 12-week campaign launched on April 1 has been designed to empower consumers with information on digitisation.
PR@BestMediaInfo.com | {
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Тупкараган — півострів в Казахстані
Тупкараган — мис на північному заході півострова Тупкараган
Дивись також
Тупкараганська затока
Тупкараганська коса
Тупкараганський район | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 5,798 |
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{"url":"https:\/\/www.hepdata.net\/record\/ins1662651","text":"\u2022 Browse all\nNeutral pion and $\\eta$ meson production at mid-rapidity in Pb-Pb collisions at $\\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV\n\nThe collaboration\nPhys.Rev., 2018\n\nAbstract (data abstract)\nCERN-LHC. Neutral pion and $\\eta$ meson production in the transverse momentum range 1 $< p_{\\rm T} <$ 20 GeV\/$c$ have been measured at midrapidity by the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in central and semi-central Pb-Pb collisions at $\\sqrt{s_{\\rm NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV. These results extend the $p_{\\rm T}$ reach of the previous ALICE PI0 measurements from 12 GeV\/$c$ to 20 GeV\/$c$ and present the first measurement of the ETA meson in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. The $\\eta$ to $\\pi^{0}$ ratio is similar for the two centralities and reaches a plateau value of 0.457 $\\pm$ 0.013$^{stat}$ $\\pm$ 0.018$^{syst}$. A suppression of the same magnitude for $\\pi^{0}$ and $\\eta$ meson production is observed in Pb-Pb collisions with respect to their production in pp collisions scaled by the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions. For both mesons, the nuclear modification factor $R_{\\rm AA}$ reaches a minimum at $p_{\\rm T} \\approx$ 7 GeV\/$c$ and then increases with transverse momentum. The measurements show a stronger suppression with respect to what was observed at lower center-of-mass energies in the $p_{\\rm T}$ range 6 $< p_{\\rm T} <$ 10 GeV\/$c$. The results are compared with statistical hadronization models at low-$p_{\\rm T}$ and with NLO pQCD jet quenching predictions at high-$p_{\\rm T}$.\n\n\u2022 #### Table 1\n\nData from Figure 2 and 6\n\n10.17182\/hepdata.83964.v1\/t1\n\nInvariant yields of the $\\pi^{0}$ meson in the centrality class 0-10% in Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 2.76 TeV at...\n\n\u2022 #### Table 2\n\nData from Figure 2 and 6\n\n10.17182\/hepdata.83964.v1\/t2\n\nInvariant yields of the $\\pi^{0}$ meson in the centrality class 20-50% in Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 2.76 TeV at...\n\n\u2022 #### Table 3\n\nData from Figure 2 and 6\n\n10.17182\/hepdata.83964.v1\/t3\n\nInvariant yields of the $\\eta$ meson in the centrality class 0-10% in Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 2.76 TeV at...\n\n\u2022 #### Table 4\n\nData from Figure 2 and 6\n\n10.17182\/hepdata.83964.v1\/t4\n\nInvariant yields of the $\\eta$ meson in the centrality class 20-50% in Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 2.76 TeV at...\n\n\u2022 #### Table 5\n\nData from Figure 4, 5 and 8\n\n10.17182\/hepdata.83964.v1\/t5\n\nNuclear modification factor R_AA of $\\pi^{0}$ produced in 0-10% central Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 2.76 TeV at mid-rapidity, T_AA...\n\n\u2022 #### Table 6\n\nData from Figure 4 and 8\n\n10.17182\/hepdata.83964.v1\/t6\n\nNuclear modification factor R_AA of $\\pi^{0}$ produced in 20-50% central Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 2.76 TeV at mid-rapidity, T_AA...\n\n\u2022 #### Table 7\n\nData from Figure 4, 5 and 8\n\n10.17182\/hepdata.83964.v1\/t7\n\nNuclear modification factor R_AA of $\\eta$ produced in 0-10% central Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 2.76 TeV at mid-rapidity, T_AA...\n\n\u2022 #### Table 8\n\nData from Figure 4 and 8\n\n10.17182\/hepdata.83964.v1\/t8\n\nNuclear modification factor R_AA of $\\eta$ produced in 20-50% central Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 2.76 TeV at mid-rapidity, T_AA...\n\n\u2022 #### Table 9\n\nData from Figure 3 and 7\n\n10.17182\/hepdata.83964.v1\/t9\n\nRatio of the $\\eta$ to $\\pi^{0}$ invariant yields in 0-10% central Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 2.76 TeV at mid-rapidity.\n\n\u2022 #### Table 10\n\nData from Figure 3 and 7\n\n10.17182\/hepdata.83964.v1\/t10\n\nRatio of the $\\eta$ to $\\pi^{0}$ invariant yields in 20-50% central Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 2.76 TeV at mid-rapidity.","date":"2019-05-21 23:14:06","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.9827610850334167, \"perplexity\": 5054.73339449363}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 20, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2019-22\/segments\/1558232256586.62\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20190521222812-20190522004812-00551.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
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<h1>Slurm Power Saving Guide</h1>
<p>Slurm provides an integrated power saving mechanism for powering down
idle nodes.
Nodes that remain idle for a configurable period of time can be placed
in a power saving mode, which can reduce power consumption or fully power down
the node.
The nodes will be restored to normal operation once work is assigned to them.
For example, power saving can be accomplished using a <i>cpufreq</i> governor
that can change CPU frequency and voltage (note that the <i>cpufreq</i> driver
must be enabled in the Linux kernel configuration).
Of particular note, Slurm can power nodes up or down
at a configurable rate to prevent rapid changes in power demands.
For example, starting a 1000 node job on an idle cluster could result
in an instantaneous surge in power demand of multiple megawatts without
Slurm's support to increase power demands in a gradual fashion.</p>
<h2>Configuration</h2>
<p>A great deal of flexibility is offered in terms of when and
how idle nodes are put into or removed from power save mode.
Note that the Slurm control daemon, <i>slurmctld</i>, must be
restarted to initially enable power saving mode.
Changes in the configuration parameters (e.g. <i>SuspendTime</i>)
will take effect after modifying the <i>slurm.conf</i> configuration
file and executing "<i>scontrol reconfig</i>".
The following configuration parameters are available:
<ul>
<li><b>SuspendTime</b>:
Nodes becomes eligible for power saving mode after being idle
for this number of seconds.
The configured value should exceed the time to suspend and resume a node.
A negative number disables power saving mode.
The default value is -1 (disabled).</li>
<li><b>SuspendRate</b>:
Maximum number of nodes to be placed into power saving mode
per minute.
A value of zero results in no limits being imposed.
The default value is 60.
Use this to prevent rapid drops in power consumption.</li>
<li><b>ResumeRate</b>:
Maximum number of nodes to be removed from power saving mode
per minute.
A value of zero results in no limits being imposed.
The default value is 300.
Use this to prevent rapid increases in power consumption.</li>
<li><b>SuspendProgram</b>:
Program to be executed to place nodes into power saving mode.
The program executes as <i>SlurmUser</i> (as configured in
<i>slurm.conf</i>).
The argument to the program will be the names of nodes to
be placed into power savings mode (using Slurm's hostlist
expression format).</li>
<li><b>ResumeProgram</b>:
Program to be executed to remove nodes from power saving mode.
The program executes as <i>SlurmUser</i> (as configured in
<i>slurm.conf</i>).
The argument to the program will be the names of nodes to
be removed from power savings mode (using Slurm's hostlist
expression format).
This program may use the <i>scontrol show node</i> command
to insure that a node has booted and the <i>slurmd</i>
daemon started.
If the <i>slurmd</i> daemon fails to respond within the
configured <b>SlurmdTimeout</b> value, the node will be
placed in a DOWN state and the job requesting the node
will be requeued.
For reasons of reliability, <b>ResumeProgram</b> may execute
more than once for a node when the <b>slurmctld</b> daemon
crashes and is restarted.</li>
<li><b>SuspendTimeout</b>:
Maximum time permitted (in second) between when a node suspend request
is issued and when the node shutdown is complete.
At that time the node must ready for a resume request to be issued
as needed for new workload.
The default value is 30 seconds.</li>
<li><b>ResumeTimeout</b>:
Maximum time permitted (in second) between when a node resume request
is issued and when the node is actually available for use.
Nodes which fail to respond in this time frame may be marked DOWN and
the jobs scheduled on the node requeued.
The default value is 60 seconds.</li>
<li><b>SuspendExcNodes</b>:
List of nodes to never place in power saving mode.
Use Slurm's hostlist expression format.
By default, no nodes are excluded.</li>
<li><b>SuspendExcParts</b>:
List of partitions with nodes to never place in power saving mode.
Multiple partitions may be specified using a comma separator.
By default, no nodes are excluded.</li>
<li><b>BatchStartTimeout</b>:
Specifies how long to wait after a batch job start request is issued
before we expect the batch job to be running on the compute node.
Depending upon how nodes are returned to service, this value may need to
be increased above its default value of 10 seconds.</li>
</ul></p>
<p>Note that <i>SuspendProgram</i> and <i>ResumeProgram</i> execute as
<i>SlurmUser</i> on the node where the <i>slurmctld</i> daemon runs
(primary and backup server nodes).
Use of <i>sudo</i> may be required for <i>SlurmUser</i>to power down
and restart nodes.
If you need to conver. Slurm's hostlist expression into individual node
names, the <i>scontrol show hostnames</i> command may prove useful.
The commands used to boot or shut down nodes will depend upon your
cluster management tools.</p>
<p>Note that <i>SuspendProgram</i> and <i>ResumeProgram</i> are not
subject to any time limits.
They should perform the required action, ideally verify the action
(e.g. node boot and start the <i>slurmd</i> daemon, thus the node is
no longer non-responsive to <i>slurmctld</i>) and terminate.
Long running programs will be logged by <i>slurmctld</i>, but not
aborted.</p>
<p>Also note that the stderr/out of the suspend and resume programs
are not logged. If logging is desired it should be added to the
scripts.</p>
<pre>
#!/bin/bash
# Example SuspendProgram
echo "`date` Suspend invoked $0 $*" >>/var/log/power_save.log
hosts=`scontrol show hostnames $1`
for host in $hosts
do
sudo node_shutdown $host
done
#!/bin/bash
# Example ResumeProgram
echo "`date` Resume invoked $0 $*" >>/var/log/power_save.log
hosts=`scontrol show hostnames $1`
for host in $hosts
do
sudo node_startup $host
done
</pre>
<p>Subject to the various rates, limits and exclusions, the power save
code follows this logic:
<ol>
<li>Identify nodes which have been idle for at least <b>SuspendTime</b>.</li>
<li>Execute <b>SuspendProgram</b> with an argument of the idle node names.</li>
<li>Identify the nodes which are in power save mode (a flag in the node's
state field), but have been allocated to jobs.</li>
<li>Execute <b>ResumeProgram</b> with an argument of the allocated node names.</li>
<li>Once the <i>slurmd</i> responds, initiate the job and/or job steps
allocated to it.</li>
<li>If the <i>slurmd</i> fails to respond within the value configured for
<b>SlurmdTimeout</b>, the node will be marked DOWN and the job requeued
if possible.</li>
<li>Repeat indefinitely.</li>
</ol></p>
<p>The slurmctld daemon will periodically (every 10 minutes) log how many
nodes are in power save mode using messages of this sort:
<pre>
[May 02 15:31:25] Power save mode 0 nodes
...
[May 02 15:41:26] Power save mode 10 nodes
...
[May 02 15:51:28] Power save mode 22 nodes
</pre>
<p>Using these logs you can easily see the effect of Slurm's power saving
support.
You can also configure Slurm with programs that perform no action as
<b>SuspendProgram</b> and <b>ResumeProgram</b> to assess the potential
impact of power saving mode before enabling it.</p>
<h2>Use of Allocations</h2>
<p>A resource allocation request will be granted as soon as resources
are selected for use, possibly before the nodes are all available
for use.
The launching of job steps will be delayed until the required nodes
have been restored to service (it prints a warning about waiting for
nodes to become available and periodically retries until they are
available).</p>
<p>In the case of an <i>sbatch</i> command, the batch program will start
when node zero of the allocation is ready for use and pre-processing can
be performed as needed before using <i>srun</i> to launch job steps.
Waiting for all nodes to be booted can be accomplished by adding the
command "<i>scontrol wait_job $SLURM_JOBID</i>" within the script or by
adding that command to the the system <i>Prolog</i> or <i>PrologSlurmctld</i>
as configured in <i>slurm.conf</i>, which would create the delay for all jobs
on the system.
Insure that the <i>Prolog</i> code is zero to avoid draining the node
(do not use the scontrol exit code to avoid draining the node on error,
for example if the job is explicitly cancelled during startup).</p>
<p>The <i>salloc</i> and <i>srun</i> commands, which create a resource
allocation, automatically wait for the nodes to power up.</p>
<p>Execution of the <i>salloc</i> command also triggers execution of the <i>Prolog</i>
script if the <i>Alloc</i> flag is set in <i>PrologFlags</i>. In this case <i>salloc</i>
waits for script termination before returning control to the user.
To not wait on the salloc side set the <i>NoHold</i> flag
in <i>PrologFlags</i>. This will automatically set
the <i>Alloc</i> flag and use the slurmd to wait for the prolog to
finish instead of salloc. This flag should be used when srun is
used to launch a step.</p>
<h2>Fault Tolerance</h2>
<p>If the <i>slurmctld</i> daemon is terminated gracefully, it will
wait up to <b>SuspendTimeout</b> or <b>ResumeTimeout</b> (whichever
is larger) for any spawned <b>SuspendProgram</b> or
<b>ResumeProgram</b> to terminate before the daemon terminates.
If the spawned program does not terminate within that time period,
the event will be logged and <i>slurmctld</i> will exit in order to
permit another <i>slurmctld</i> daemon to be initiated.
Synchronization problems could also occur when the <i>slurmctld</i>
daemon crashes (a rare event) and is restarted. </p>
<p>In either event, the newly initiated <i>slurmctld</i> daemon (or
the backup server) will recover saved node state information that
may not accurately describe the actual node state.
In the case of a failed <b>SuspendProgram</b>, the negative impact is
limited to increased power consumption, so no special action is
currently taken to execute <b>SuspendProgram</b> multiple times in
order to insure the node is in a reduced power mode.
The case of a failed <b>ResumeProgram</b> is more serious in that the
node could be placed into a DOWN state and/or jobs could fail.
In order to minimize this risk, when the <i>slurmctld</i> daemon is
started and node which should be allocated to a job fails to respond,
the <b>ResumeProgram</b> will be executed (possibly for a second time).</p>
<h2>Booting Different Images</h2>
<p>Slurm's <b>PrologSlurmctld</b> configuration parameter can identify a
program to boot different operating system images for each job based upon it's
constraint field (or possibly comment).
If you want <b>ResumeProgram</b> to boot a various images according to
job specifications, it will need to be a fairly sophisticated program
and perform the following actions:
<ol>
<li>Determine which jobs are associated with the nodes to be booted</li>
<li>Determine which image is required for each job and</li>
<li>Boot the appropriate image for each node</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align:center;">Last modified 15 April 2015</p>
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| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 6,742 |
Bon Appetito
Guido's Italian Ristorante & Pizza Cafe uses the freshest ingredients to create delicious, homemade Chicago style pizzas, Italian specialties, sandwiches, and salads you won't find anywhere else. But don't take our word for it... the proof is in our food!
The Place The Locals Go!
The Original Guido's Italian
Ristorante & Pizza Cafe
"Old Style Italian Cooking In a Casual Friendly Setting"
Guido's is a family restaurant dating back to 1918
TAKE AND BAKE PIZZA
7219 Forest Oaks Blvd
Copyright © 2021 Guido's Pizza Cafe
Website Created By: MaxGroup Business Solutions
William H. Wells
It was 1918 when my Grandpa Dominick and his brother, Uncle Jim Guido, immigrated from Cozenza, Italy. They opened their first restaurant, Wells Brothers, in Racine, Wisconsin. Following in the family tradition, my Dad, Bill Wells went to Chicago in the 1940's and learned the art of making the best pizza that can be made. Not many people know that the original Chicago-style pizza actually had the thin crust that our Guido's customers have come to love! Dad continued to work with his cousins, Guy and Tony Wells operating the restaurant that their fathers had started, with pizza and classic Italian dishes always our specialty. Today, Wells Brothers restaurant in Racine is operated by my cousins Paula & Bill and still enjoy success after nearly 90 years.
In 1962, Dad opened his first solo restaurant, the Cozy Lounge. Several years later, he changed the name to Guido's, in honor of our family's original last name. Over the years, there would be a total of ten Guido's restaurants located from Racine, Madison, and Green Bay, Wisconsin, down to Sarasota, New Port Richey, Crystal River and since 1984, Spring Hill, Florida. As I grew up, it was natural for me to work hand in hand with my father, learning the business and art of serving good food. Dad and I had a special relationship. We worked, lived, laughed and cried together. Dad passed away at the age of 73 on January 17, 2007. As the third generation owner of Guido's and after 50 years of tried and true experience, I am proud to carry on the tradition of truly caring, as my father taught me.
Today, Guido's is all the more cherished by our family and devoted staff as we remember the guiding love and passion that my dad and his wife, Kelly, brought to the restaurant everyday. I too, believe that our customers are our first priority. Just like Dad, Grandpa and our family in Racine, we continuously strive to prepare the finest quality food available with courteous and efficient service in a cozy atmosphere. We hope you enjoy your dining experience. Bon Appetito!
Home About Us Menu Location Gallery Employment
Dine In | Take Out | Take & Bake Pizza | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 4,077 |
De Fineilspitze (vroeger ook Finailspitze, Italiaans: Punta di Finale) is een 3514 meter (volgens andere bronnen 3516 meter) hoge bergtop in de Ötztaler Alpen op de grens tussen het Oostenrijkse Tirol en het Italiaanse Zuid-Tirol.
De berg is gelegen in de Schnalskam, even ten oosten van de Gepatschferner en ten zuidwesten van de Hauslabjoch. De top is via een middelzware bergtocht over gletsjers te bereiken.
Referenties
Berg in Tirol
Berg in Zuid-Tirol
Drieduizender | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 8,187 |
Clary sage oil has a sweet smell and is pale yellow in colour having watery viscosity.
It originated in Southern Europe.
It is extracted from its botanical matter using steam distillation process.
Linalol, Linalyl Acetate, Germacrene, Geranyl Acetate.
Anticonvulsive, antiseptic, antidepressant, aphrodisiac, astringent, bactericidal, carminative, deodorant, digestive, emmenagogue, euphoric, nervine, nerve tonic, sedative and stomachic.
Clary sage oil is used to calm the nervous system, particularly in the case of stress, depression and insomnia.
It is a good tonic for the womb and female functions in general.
It is good for relieving muscle pains, digestive and kidney disorders and for the skin.
Clary sage should be avoided when consuming alcohol.
It is non-toxic but large doses can lead to a headache.
It must be avoided during pregnancy.
Frankincense, Geranium, Jasmine, Juniper, Lavender, Pine and Sandalwood. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 4,856 |
0.3.0 improves performance, adds support for the WebVR 1.0 API, and adds
tracked controllers (using experimental Gamepad APIs).
### Major Changes
- WebVR 1.0 API support. (#1423)
- Default camera is now positioned at `0, 1.6, 0` rather than `0, 1.8, -4`. In VR mode, the `1.6m` height offset as defined by `camera.userHeight` is removed. (#1474, #1718)
- Components no longer serialize stringified data to the DOM for performance. Introduced debug mode and flush-to-DOM methods. (#1323)
- No longer able to provide own `<canvas>` element. (#1474)
- Geometries default to be [BufferGeometry](http://threejs.org/docs/#Reference/Core/BufferGeometry)s, saving memory at the cost of being more difficult to manually manipulate. Use `geometry="buffer: false"` to disable. (#633) -- Geometry data is preserved in `geometry.metadata`. (#1557).
- Removed deprecated declarative events, loader component, and `<a-cube>`. (29446e0)
- Abstract raycasting-related properties out of the cursor component into the raycaster component. (#1196)
- Have shaders handle applying texture objects to material objects rather than material system. (2cee9eb)
- Removed geometry component's `translate` property, added a `pivot` component in `extras/`. (#1339)
- Renamed `defaultAttributes` to `defaultComponents` in `registerPrimitive` API. (#1460)
- Default lighting setup tweaked. (#1478)
- Made `sound.src` use the `src` property type. Sound URLs must now either be wrapped in `url()` or a selector to an `<audio>` element. (#1629)
- Added A-Frame Code of Conduct. (#954)
- Reduced webvr-polyfill `BUFFER_SCALE` to `1 / window.devicePixelRatio` only for iOS versions under 10 as a workaround to a Webkit bug. This will cause decrease resolutions on iPhone VR mode temporarily. It can be overridden in `window.WebVRConfig.BUFFER_SCALE`, but will cause canvas sizing issues upon entering stereo causing people to have to rotate their phones back and forth. (#1803)
### Deprecations
- Declarative Events deprecated in favor of [ngokevin/aframe-event-set-component](https://github.com/ngokevin/aframe-event-set-component). (#1634)
- `look-at` component deprecated and moved to [ngokevin/aframe-look-at-component](https://github.com/ngokevin/aframe-look-at-component). (#1447)
- `<a-model>` primitive deprecated in favor of `<a-collada-model>` and `<a-obj-model>`. (#1525)
### Enhancements
- Added `tracked-controls`, `vive-controls`, and `hand-controls` components. (#1584)
- Added API for multiple components of the same type (e.g., `sound__1`, `sound__2`). (#1596)
- Added schemas to systems. (#1589)
- `<a-asset-item>`s now truly cached and only fetched once. (#1700)
- Added better support for embedded scenes with `<a-scene embedded>`. (#1474)
- Can now enter fullscreen if headset is not connected. (#1474)
- Added `AFRAME.registerGeometry` API such that each geometry type has its own distinct schema. (#1162)
- Bumped `webvr-polyfill` to 0.9.15. (#1618)
- Dispose `THREE.Geometry` and `THREE.Material` objects when no longer in use to save memory. (#1287)
- Moved texture caching to material system. (#1315)
- Reduced default `<a-sky>`, `<a-videosphere>` segments. (#1319, #1532)
- Added geometry caching system to save memory. (#1347)
- Improved GearVR support. (#1336)
- Removed unnecessary object diffing calls. (1c924b6)
- Added geometry merging API to reduce number of draw calls for geometries that share the same material. (bd0dbcb)
- Added support for animation of color property types. (#1302)
- Added icosahedron, dodecahedron, octahedron, tetrahedron geometries. (#1413, #1493)
- Better NPM v3 support. (#1430)
- Added more properties to the raycaster component. (#1196)
- Added more properties to the sphere component. (#1454)
- Added `light.intensity`, `light.target` properties. (#1270, #1728)
- Added `camera.zoom` property. (#1453)
- Added `<a-sound>`, `<a-torus-knot>` primitives. (#1455, #1456)
- Added `componentremoved` event for entities. (#1434)
- Remove injected A-Frame favicon. (#1415)
- Added `end` attribute for animations to stop on events. (#1481)
- Added separate `delay` attribute for animations. (#1508)
- Added `material.flatShading`, `material.visible` properties. (#1503, #1690)
- Defaulted `geometry.primitive` to `box`. (#1523)
- Versioned the A-Frame documentation.
- Custom materials lifecycle methods only require to set `this.material` rather than return. (#1549)
- Added support for `<canvas>` to be a source of texture for materials. (#1567)
- Added utility functions for getting and setting properties of multi-prop components. (#1595)
- `selectorAll` property type now converts `NodeList` to `Array`. (#1642)
- Changed default stats UI background color to gray. (#1644)
- Exposed list of registered primitives. (#1643)
- Removed instances of hard-coded `<a-scene>`, done to support an independent augmented reality (AR) initiative. (#1665)
- Added cursor grabbing styles to look-controls component. (#1680)
- Added support for mixins being attached at runtime, done to support a third-party CSS syntax for components. (#1610)
- Added `<ctrl> + <alt> + i` shortcut to inject the A-Frame Inspector tool. (#1599)
- Removed a `Function.prototype.bind` call on each frame render (#1808)
## Fixes
- Fixed deep-seated prototype callback order invocation bug in `document.registerElement` wrapper. (#1689)
- Fixed look-controls component when dragging mouse off of canvas. (#1474)
- Fixed primitives not correctly merging properties with defined components. (#1324)
- Fixed being able to provide size to custom canvas. (#1322)
- Fixed merging of mapped properties and component properties for primitives. (#1332)
- Fixed not being able to disable video autoplay. (#1353)
- Fixed dynamically attached entities not playing. (#1415)
- Fixed primitives overriding defined attributes. (#1448)
- Fixed raycasting on loaded models. (#1497)
- Fixed having multiple COLLADA models in a scene. (#1511)
- Fixed components not being initialized before playing. (#1565)
- Fixed `material.repeat` not being able to be a float. (#1568)
- Fixed single-property components with a default truthy value not obeying truthiness if defined in HTML without a value. (#1631)
- Fixed spotlight angles. (#1728)
## 0.2.0
0.2.0 improves extensibility:
- Component API has been greatly enhanced with more lifecycle methods, schema options, and property types.
- Components can be applied to primitives (e.g., `<a-box>`).
- Custom GLSL shaders can be shared and registered to provide more visual effects.
### Major Changes
- `aframe-core` merged with `aframe`. `window.AFRAME` exposes what `aframe-core` was exposing previously (e.g., `AFRAME.registerComponent` vs. `AFRAME.aframeCore.registerComponent`). (#368)
- `<a-assets>` must be declared within `<a-scene>`. (#910)
- `<a-entity>.object3D` is now a `THREE.Group`. Use `<a-entity>.setObject3D` API to add new 3D objects from components. (#847)
- Bumped three.js to r74 stable. (#1006)
- npm points to a prebuilt bundle of `dist/aframe.js`.
- Scene `<canvas>` elements are now appended to the scene by default rather than to the document body. The scene can specify which `<canvas>` to render to. (c0aa360)
- Primitives such as `<a-sphere>` directly extend `<a-entity>` rather than template them. They can be registered with `AFRAME.registerPrimitive`. (#883)
- `<a-template>` and HTML Imports logic have been removed. Use https://github.com/ngokevin/aframe-template-component in the meantime. (#883)
- `<a-camera>` no longer creates a cursor on its own. Do `<a-camera><a-cursor></a-cursor></a-camera>` instead. (#883)
- Default geometry `depth`, `height`, `width` property values changed from `2` to `1`. (#1245)
- Default color of primitive elements such as `<a-box>` changed to `#FFF` to not interfere with textures. (#1245)
### Deprecations
- `loader` component deprecated in favor of `collada-model` and `obj-model`. (#913)
- `<a-model>` deprecated in favor of `<a-collada-model>` and `<a-obj-model>`. (#883)
- `<a-EVENTNAME>` elements such as `<a-mouseenter>` deprecated in favor of `<a-event name="EVENTNAME">` (unstable). (#883)
- `<a-cube>` deprecated in favor of `<a-box>`. (#883)
### Enhancements
- Introduced *shaders* to extend the material component and to register custom GLSL shaders. (#861)
- Component *property types*. Property types define how a component property is parsed and stringified. Custom property types can be registered or defined inline with the property in the schema. Built-in property types include `array`, `boolean`, `color`, `int`, `number`, `selector`, `selectorAll`, `string`, `vec2`, `vec3`, `vec4`. (d35e56e)
- *Single-property components*. A component can define itself as consisting of only one property by specifying a type and/or a default value in the schema. (d35e56e)
- *Asset management system* that blocks scene render.
- *Play/pause* methods on entities and play/pause handlers on components. (9238861)
- *Tick* method on components to register a function called on each scene tick. (#823)
- Support for loading *`.OBJ`* and `.MTL` assets. (#788)
- *Texture caching* for better performance when reusing textures. (#1116)
- Components can be attached to primitives (e.g., `<a-sphere>`). (#883)
- Introduce *systems* API (unstable) to provide global scope and services for components. They can be registered wtih `AFRAME.registerSystem`. (#924)
- Entities, including the scene, wait for their children to load before emitting the `loaded` event. (a8a4f06)
- Entities emit `child-attach` when children are attached.
- Most `<a-scene>` logic moved to configurable components and systems. (#776)
- Support for *multiple cameras* in a scene and switching between them. (#745)
- Added more events for scene VR mode, material component, model components, and sound component.
- Default geometry `segments*` property values increased for smoother meshes. (#1245)
- Added more meta tags for mobile web-app capabilities, automatically set properties to video elements for inline video playback on iOS. (#316)
- Added three.js stats to the stats component. (#1223)
- Added `<a-torus>` primitive. (#1184)
## Fixes
- Stop `<a-animation>` when detached. (#727)
- Fixed `<a-animation>` `begin` attribute. (#885)
- Keyboard shortcuts no longer trigger when used alongside modifier keys. (#1211)
- Fixed viewport issues in Twitter webview on IOS. (#1174)
- Raycaster and cursor components can now intersect with loaded models. (#1166)
### v0.1.3 (Februrary 18, 2016)
- Improved positional tracking. (#1157)
### v0.1.2 (Februrary 18, 2016)
- Fixed Android shader bugs for devices like Motorola and OnePlus. (ceb5fa)
## v0.1.0 (December 16, 2015)
- Initial public release
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 76 |
Ozzy Osbourne Allegedly Got So High, He Thought Sharon Was Trying to Kill Him
Cassandra Rose
News is still filtering in on the alleged split between Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne.
The latest? The mumbling rock star was once so high that he was convinced his wife of 30 years was trying to take him out. And we don't mean to dinner.
According to the Daily Star, things for the now-separated couple came to a head one night when a very drunk Ozzy ran around their mansion screaming, "She's trying to kill me!"
Realizing that he wasn't screeching out a new Sabbath hit, Sharon moved out of their home after a Molotov-cocktail of drugs in Ozzy's system kept him up for six entire days without sleep. A length of time which would probably fell a lesser mortal.
A source (read: likely paid informant) close to the couple, or rather former couple, said Sharon "just wants out at this point. Ozzy seems to think he can win her back but Sharon isn't so sure as she's been living in a private hell."
"It was heartbreaking for her. He was living in an imaginary world for most of the time and seeing a lot of things that weren't even there," a different source chimed in. "On occasions, Sharon didn't even know where he was for hours and sometimes even days. He was running around in the same clothes all the time, not washing."
Ozzy recently said that yes, he had fallen off the wagon, but that he's been sober for over a month now. Regardless, he insists he and his wife are not divorcing.
At the same time, Sharon's leaning on some celebrity pals like Simon Cowell and Elton John, who sources say are telling her that after surviving cancer and looking after Ozzy for more than three decades, "it's time to look after herself." | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 9,954 |
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