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say Jack Robinson? James Morrow Walsh. He could have begged off, pled illness; there were plenty who would have done it, and kept their soft seat in Arkansas. Not a speck of gratitude tendered to him; instead he had been scolded, chided, threatened like a jam-fingered child.
    Was he suspect because he had received his commission from Sir John A.’s Conservatives? Did the Liberal Scott read treachery in his face? It couldn’t be that. Plenty of other officers had received their appointments from the Tories. Surely it was known he didn’t give a fig for politics.
    It had to be that Scott objected to him on moral grounds. Heard that on occasion he avails himself of the services of sporting women in Fort Benton, does a little of what the men like to call “tipi creeping” when he visits Indian camps. One look at Scott was enough to tell you that the twig between his legs hadn’t had its bark peeled back in a coon’s age. Mr. Secretary ought to read Surgeon Kittson’s annual medical report with more attention. That would give him an education in human nature: the number of cases of clap Kittson treated every year at Fort Walsh.
    Perhaps somebody had told the old teetotaller he keeps a bottle in his desk. The Territories may be officially dry, but circumstances require the law to be winked at now and then. Sometimes difficulties arise between officers, and a drink is called for to settle them. Whiskey eases disagreements. It’s a question of sustaining morale. As the actress said to the bishop, “One spot is always wet and welcoming, milord.” In the Cypress Hills, that wet and welcoming spot is his office.
    Enough, thinks Walsh. With a violent jerk, he rakes his boot off the desk and snatches down his pant leg. Enough returning to past humiliations like a dog to its vomit. He thrusts himself off the chair and hobbles to the window. Gazing out the dusty, spy-speckled pane, he sees men going from bakery to mess, their arms stacked high with loaves of bread. Walsh feels the erysipelas throb in his own knees as he watches the veterinary surgeon run his hands up and down the cannon of a horse, examining it for swelling. The square of the fort is a bright box of noonday sun; the Union Jack hangs limply from the flagpole like a dishcloth on a peg. Louis Léveillé, his favourite scout, sits on the stoop of the guides’ quarters, contentedly sucking on his pipe. There’s a man who could teach Scott a thing or two about loyalty, how it’s earned. If you’re foursquare, straightforward, Léveillé is yours until kingdom come. If he asked Léveillé to douse himself in kerosene and set himself afire, the guide would ask for a match. But underhanded, sneaky sorts like Scott can’t grasp the power of frankness to bind men together. They dance you down a tightrope and are only too pleased to see you fall.
    And that thought turns Walsh to Michael Dunne. A sneaky, conniving, underhanded bastard if he’s ever seen one. Two days ago, Dunne had slid into his office, stuffed into that tight black suit of his like a sausage in its casing, the staring, glassy-eyed son of a bitch. Started bombarding him with insinuations, hinting at political and diplomatic tangles that Scott had never breathed a word about. Baffling him with what ifs, hints that the wicket was stickier than he could have dreamed, and suggesting that if Dunne’s palms were greased he could see to it that the roof didn’t fall down on the good Major’s head. It was all so exasperating he had ordered the fellow out of his office, and Dunne had risen to his feet, a smile pasted on his mug that said: More fool you, Walsh. The next day he departed Fort Walsh, gone like fog in the sun. But not without leaving behind something that had ripened into doubt.
    What he wants is advice, and he thinks Case may be the man to give it. Politics is the storybook his father read him on his knee; he’s sucked its tricks up with his mother’s milk. If there’s anyone familiar with the