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be a fool—” Tom mumbled the words, then turned restlessly on the bed next to Archer’s. “Linc…No…”
    Archer realized what had awakened him. In the first year after the war with Spain, Tom’s nightmares had been frequent and occasionally so violent that restraining him was necessary for his safety. Even if Archer woke him, it sometimes took Tom minutes to realize the nightmare had been only that.
    Now, from the words he’d uttered, Archer knew what his friend was dreaming about, and he debated what to do. Sometimes, after minutes of tossing, Tom fell into a deeper sleep. But sometimes the nightmares consumed him, and for Archer’s own peace, he was forced to shake his friend to bring him awake.
    Archer lay still and waited to decide which would be best.
    â€œWe’re not here…to fight each other.” Tom mumbled something else; then, for a moment, at least, he fell silent.
    Even in his sleep, fair-minded Tom got the story right. The men of the Volunteer First Cavalry, known to the world as the Rough Riders, hadn’t been sent to Cuba to fight each other. They’d been an odd mixture of trail-roughened cowboys and idealistic aristocrats guaranteed to have both the brains and brawn an Army unit needed. Despite the difference in their education and background, they had come together to fight a common enemy, the Spanish, who were said to have sabotaged the Maine and enslaved the Cuban people.
    Archer hadn’t enlisted because he gave one damn what happened to the dark-skinned denizens of an island too distant to be a threat. When the call went out from Teddy Roosevelt, Archer had signed on because the army was a way out of trouble. A certain rancher wasn’t pleased that he had lost most of his hard-earned savings to Archer in an Amarillo poker game, and he had threatened to prove that Archer had cheated. Since Archer had, he had seen the free trip to Cuba as a way to hold his head high and still keep his neck out of a noose.
    Of course Tom hadn’t joined the Rough Riders because he was in trouble, or even because he wanted to explore the world. He was a man who felt the suffering of others as if it were his stomach that rumbled with hunger, his throat that was parched with thirst. Tom, a skilled athlete, horseman and sharpshooter, was also the sole heir to a fortune. His father was a railroad tycoon in boomtown San Francisco, and someday Tom would inherit a significant part of the city. Without thought of the riches that would someday be his, he had pledged his destiny to Roosevelt even after his father had threatened to pledge Tom’s inheritance to distant relatives.
    Although both men were assigned to K Troop, at firstneither had taken notice of the other, content to seek out their own kind. Then one night, in a beer garden near Riverside Park in San Antonio, K Troop’s drill sergeant, a miner named Linc Webster, began to turn his considerable talent for torment against Tom.
    Despite the hardships of training, Linc had always managed to find enough liquor to stay one drink beyond belligerent. That night he had objected to an innocent remark of Tom’s, and without thinking, Archer, who always relished a fight, inserted himself between the bully and the aristocrat. Linc threw a punch, Archer pushed Tom out of the way, and Linc was thrown by the force of his own swing to the ground, accompanied by the laughter of everyone who witnessed it.
    Tom and Archer, bound together by Archer’s action, became firm friends. But from that moment on Linc made revenge against Tom his life’s mission. In San Antonio, and later in Tampa, Tom was given the dirtiest jobs. When mounts were assigned, Tom’s, not surprisingly, was a knock-kneed, walleyed gelding he was glad to leave behind when the Rough Riders discovered they were going to ride shank’s mare during their conquest of Cuba.
    Linc’s campaign against Tom grew dirtier as the days passed.