“Washington,” the older man said gruffly. “George Nathaniel. I was Mayor of this County a few years back. I have a ranch up river. I was Colonel of the North Texas Brigade in the last war; I thought I was done with soldiering after that.”
Greg Torrance frowned.
“Aren’t you in the wrong uniform, sir?”
“I resigned my commission in sixty-seven,” George Nathaniel Washington cast his eyes down onto his battledress. “This was the only tunic in the4 stores in town that fitted me.”
Bill Fielding stared at the man.
“Well, Colonel,” Greg Torrance sighed. “I was about to try to talk everybody into extending the runway, digging slit trenches and defending this field as something of a forward reconnaissance, patrol and sally point,” he explained, feeling a little foolish. “But that was when I was still under the mistaken impression that I was the senior officer present. Patently, that is not case.”
Torrance and beside him, Bill Fielding came to attention and saluted the other man.
Around the room, unbidden, almost in groaning existential relief that at last somebody had stepped forward, others began to do likewise.
George Washington stood like an island in the stream, oddly apart and for a moment, an onlooker might have suspected he was seriously contemplating refusing the command which was being thrust upon his shoulders.
In saying that he had ‘resigned’ his commission he had stretched the truth somewhat. In fact, he had requested to be assigned to the Reserve on the grounds that he could not afford to devote more than a month a year to military duties; after all, he had a family that depended on him and a ranch to run. Similarly, when he said he had been Mayor of Trinity Crossing a ‘few years back’, actually he had been Lieutenant Sheriff of the District of Northern Texas until a little less than a year ago, to all intents, the King’s representative for most of the several thousands of square miles of the Unincorporated Territory between the Trinity and the Red Rivers.
In both war and peace, duty and service had always weighed heavily on his now stooped shoulders.
George Washington had no fond memories of war, or of leading men in combat. He had been happy, content, in his element ranching the country of his youth before his head had been turned by the bright lights of the East, first at William Penn College in Philadelphia, then as a ‘Sword Student’ in England at Sandhurst, through baptisms of fire in India and Egypt, where his regiment had guarded the army of men digging that great ditch across the desert to link the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, before returning a decade later to the land of his birth where brutal attrition and defeat had elevated him from brevet battalion command to acting Brigadier, 1st Texas Mechanised Infantry in the last Border War. Afterwards, they had made him substantive Colonel, stuck a Military Cross on his chest and offered him a garrison post down on the Border.
Nobody had tried to stop him returning home, by then his twenty-two-year contract with the British Army was at an end, and he had earned the right to give his young family an idyllic home overlooking the valley of the west fork of the Trinity River. It had seemed like a good place to bring up his boys and he and his wife, Mary Dandridge, the Punjab-born daughter of an Indian Army officer, had been happy enough, even when the droughts of the last few years bit hard.
He had known that this new war had been coming a long time; only the fools in Philadelphia had not noticed the writing on the wall, turned a blind eye to the emissaries of the Mexican Republic who had travelled these lands with impunity, salting the battlefield and seducing the unwary and the Catholic-minded to defect, or leastways, to stand aside when the armies of New Spain came north to reclaim what, to a man, its fighting men believed was their birth right.
There had been many times over the years when he had asked himself if he ought to try to do something about the malaise but he had fallen out of contact with old friends from his Army days; and wanted only to build a new, second life in this country; God’s own land.
George Washington met the eye of the dapper, dark-eyed man beside the young pilot. Unlike Torrance, who seemed relieved to be able to pass on the burden of command; Sergeant Fielding was giving him a very odd look.
The older man returned the salutes.
He looked around the room, made eye contacts with two men who had until then, been anonymous in the crowd.
