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The Wolves stayed on their horses. One looked halfway familiar to Valentine-then it came to him; he'd been a Wolf at his Invocation, though the name escaped him. The Wolves' hands were conspicuously off their weapons.
"Could you step outside, sir?" The jowly man's laminated name tag said Goebbert.
"What's this about?"
"Just step outside, please, sir."
They ignored Molly and her wide-eyed child. As Valentine came out the Wolves got off their horses.
"You're a hard guy to find, Valentine," the other Rounder put in. He had cockeyed ears, like a hound listening to a raccoon on the roof. He handed a pair of handcuffs to Goebbert.
"Sir, please turn around and put your hands behind you."
Valentine's heart fired like a triphammer. What the hell?
"What's this about?" Valentine repeated, sounding a lot less like a major this time.
"You're under arrest for murder," Goebbert said.
"Murder?" Valentine felt sweat everywhere.
Goebbert grabbed him firmly by the wrist. "Sorry, Major, orders."
They patted him down. Valentine winced as the hard hands traveled over the old scar tissue on the backs of his legs.
"David, what's going on?" Molly asked from her porch. She held Edward sideways, putting her body in between her son and the four strangers.
"It's got to be a mistake," Valentine said, looking again at the Wolf. Hammond, that was his name. The other young Wolves called him "Lightning" because he had a little tuft of blond hair in his brown.
"Might be," Goebbert said. "But we have to take you to court. Okay, Jim, he's in custody. Make a note of the time."
"Hammond, what is this?" Valentine asked.
Hammond might have smiled-his walrus mustache changed shape-though Valentine wondered why he would look pleased to be recognized by someone being arrested for murder. "We just got orders to make sure you come in. These boys were scared you'd get wind and take to the hills."
Molly had doubt in her eyes; she squinted against it as she might protect herself against dust.
"Molly, I'm not a fugitive. I wasn't hiding with you."
"Enough, Major," Goebbert said. "We've got to get you away. Help him mount, Hammond."
"Put him up backward. Fugitive mount," Uneven Ears said. "They say he's tricky."
The Wolves helped him mount. Sitting backward on the saddle made the night even more surreal. "My gear's in the barn-"
"It'll come along," the other Wolf put in.
"Where are you taking him?" Molly blurted, perhaps too emotionally, for Edward started to cry.
"Crowley Garrison Station, then on to Fort Allnutt, ma'am," Goebbert replied. Valentine craned his neck around and saw Goebbert shaking his head at his fellow Rounder.
David Valentine rode out of Quapaw Post backward. The soldiers came out of their cabins to see the "rogue parade," wondering faces glowing in the moonlight like jack-o'-lanterns.
They showed their paperwork at the gate, and carried out his gear on the Wolves' horses. Valentine, facing backward on his mount, carried only the memory of the fear in Edward Stockton's eyes. And the doubt in Molly's.
The Nut, May: The Nut was an Arkansas State Medium Security Correctional Facility known as Pine Ridge before the Kurian Order, and would probably have remained another overgrown jumble of fence and concrete were it not for Mountain Home, the nearby town that fate selected to be the capital of the Ozark Free Territory (2028-2070).
There are any number of legends as to how Mountain Home ("Gateway to the Ozarks") became the seat of the Free Territory and the headquarters of Southern Command. The more colorful legends involve a poker game, a fistfight, a bad map, a general's mistress, or a souvenir shot glass, but the most likely story concerns Colonel "Highball" Holloway and her wayward signals column.
