Part 1
Sergeant Abram Coles had ridden a great many miles for the United States Army, but never once for a doll.
It was December 1883, at Fort Davis, in the mountains of West Texas, where the Tenth Cavalry kept the roads. Abram was fifty-five years old. He had enlisted in 1867, in the regiment's first year, and he was the oldest man in his troop by eleven years. The young troopers called him Pop when they thought he could not hear.
Rosie Banks was six.
Her father, Private Jim Banks, was away with a detachment on the Rio Grande until spring. Her mother, Celia, took in washing for the troop. And for three weeks, since the first of December, Rosie had lain in the narrow bed in the laundress quarters with a fever that came and went and came back, while the post surgeon shook his head and said she would mend, very likely, if she kept her strength.
She did not seem to want to keep anything.
Abram went to see her on the twentieth, because Celia asked him to. He sat on an upturned bucket by the bed with his hat on his knee.
"What do you want for Christmas, Miss Rosie?" he said.
He expected her not to answer. She had not been answering much.
"A doll," she whispered. "A real one. With a face."
Abram knew the kind she meant. He had seen one, at Thanksgiving, on escort duty to the railroad at Valentine. Thirty-six miles west, across the high grass. In the window of the little store the railroad men kept beside the depot, there had been one china-headed doll in a blue dress, with painted black hair and painted blue eyes. Two dollars and a half.
He had stood in front of that window longer than a grown sergeant had any business standing. Then he had gone inside and paid the storekeeper fifty cents to hold it, and put the receipt in his breast pocket, and felt a fool all the way home.
He had not known, then, who it was for.
"A doll with a face," Abram said. "I'll see what I can do."
Rosie looked at him. For the first time in three weeks, something moved in her eyes.
"Promise?"
Abram was not a man who made promises lightly. In sixteen years he had made maybe four.
"Promise," he said.
The captain gave him a pass from noon on the twenty-third until reveille on Christmas morning.
"Seventy-two miles, Sergeant," the captain said. "In two days. In December. For a toy."
"Yes, sir."
The captain looked at him over the pass a moment, then signed it.
"Take the bay," he said. "And for God's sake take your buffalo coat."
Abram rode out at noon on the twenty-third under a hard blue sky. It was warm for December. Too warm. The wind had gone around to the south and blew soft against his face, and a line of thin high clouds lay along the northern horizon like a chalk mark.
He looked at that line a good while.
Sixteen years on the Texas frontier had taught him to read a sky. A warm south wind in winter, and a dark line in the north. That was a norther coming. A blue norther, the old Texans called them. The kind that could drop the air forty degrees in an hour and turn rain to sleet before a man could button his coat.
He would have to be quick.
He was at Valentine by dark, stiff in every joint. The store was still open, lit by one coal-oil lamp. The doll was in the window.
The storekeeper was a thin young man with a pencil behind his ear. He looked at Abram's uniform, at his face, and then at the receipt Abram laid on the counter.
"That doll's sold," he said.
"I have your receipt for it. Fifty cents down. In your own hand."
The storekeeper did not look at the receipt.
"Foreman's wife wants it for her girl. She's coming in tomorrow." He shrugged. "Mister, she spends forty dollars a month in this store. You spend fifty cents."
Abram stood very straight.
He was tired. He was fifty-five. His back hurt and his knees hurt and he had ridden thirty-six miles that afternoon, and he could feel the old anger rising in him, the anger he had learned a long time ago to keep folded up small, like a letter in a pocket, because a Black soldier who let it out in a white man's store did not ride home.
He kept it folded.
"I paid for it," he said quietly. "Here is your name, and the date, and the amount. Thanksgiving Day. If you sell my doll to another customer, sir, I will ride back in the morning with my captain, and he will want to know why the railroad store does not honor its own receipts."
The storekeeper looked at the receipt then. He read it twice.
Then he took the doll out of the window without a word, wrapped it in brown paper, and took Abram's two dollars.
Abram slept three hours on a bench in the depot and rode out at three in the morning.
The wind had died. The stars were very sharp. At dawn the chalk line in the north had become a wall, blue-black and rolling, so close he could see the dust lifting along the bottom of it.
It hit him at nine o'clock, twenty miles from the fort.
The wind came first, swinging into the north with a scream, so cold it felt like being struck. Then the rain, then sleet in the rain, then sleet alone, driving sideways across the grass. Within the hour the bay's mane was white with ice. Abram's beard froze. He buttoned the doll inside his buffalo coat, against his chest, and rode on with his head down.
At noon the bay put his near forefoot in a hole hidden under the sleet, and stumbled, and came up lame.
Abram got down in the howling wind and felt the leg. Not broken. But the horse would not carry him.
Eighteen miles. Sleet to his ankles. The light already going gray.
He stood in the storm with one hand on the bay's neck and the other pressed flat over the parcel inside his coat.