Page 84 of The Veteran

‘As to hygiene, you see the armoury over there? It has racks of replica Springfields, but behind a false wall is a real bathhouse with hot running water, toilets, faucets and basins and showers. And the giant butt for rainwater? We have underground piped water. The butt has a secret entrance at the back. Inside is a gas-operated refrigeration unit for steaks, chops, vegetables, fruit. Bottled gas. But that’s it. No electricity. Candles and oil lamps only.’

They were at the door of the travellers’ bunkhouse. One of the officials peered inside.

‘It seems you have had a squatter,’ he remarked. They all stared at the blanketed bunk in the corner. Then they found other traces. Horse dung in the stable, the embers of a fire. The senator roared with laughter.

‘Seems some of your visitors can’t wait,’ he said. ‘Maybe you have a real frontiersman in residence.’

They all laughed at that.

‘Seriously, Professor, it’s a great job. I’m sure we all agree. You are to be congratulated. An asset to our state.’

With that they left. The professor locked the front gate behind him, still wondering about the bunk and the horse dung. The three vehicles ground down the rough tracks to the long strip of black rock, Highway 310, and turned north for Billings and the airport.

Ben Craig returned from his trapping two hours later. The first clue that his solitude had been disturbed was that the door in the main wall near the chapel had been barred from the inside. He knew he had left it closed but wedged. Whoever had done it had either left by the main gate or was still inside.

He checked the big gates but they were still locked. There were strange tracks outside which he could not understand, as if made by wagon wheels but wider with zigzag patterns in them.

Rifle in hand, he went over the wall, but after an hour of checking he was satisfied there was no-one else there. He unbarred his door, led Rosebud inside, saw her stabled and fed, then re-examined the footmarks in the main parade ground. There were marks of shoes and heavy hiking boots, and more of the zigzag tracks, but no marks of hoofs. And there were no shoe-marks outside the gate. It was all very odd.

Two weeks later the resident staff party arrived. Once again Craig was out tending his traps in the foothills of the Pryors.

It was quite a column. There were three buses, four cars with spare drivers to take them away and twenty horses in big silver trailers. When they were all unloaded the vehicles drove away.

The staff had changed back in Billings into the costumes appropriate for their roles. Each had a backpack of changes of clothing and personal effects. The professor had checked everything and insisted that nothing ‘modern’ be brought along. Nothing electrical or battery-operated was allowed. For some it had been a wrench parting with their transistor radios, but it went with the contract. Not even books published in the twentieth century were allowed. Professor Ingles insisted that a complete change by one entire century was vital, both from the point of total authenticity and from a psychological angle.

‘With time you really will get to believe you are what you are, frontier people living in a crucial time in Montana’s history,’ he told them.

For several hours the drama students, having volunteered not only for a summer job that beat waiting tables but also for an educational experience that would help with their careers, explored their new environment with growing enthusiasm.

The cavalry troopers stabled their horses and fixed their sleeping quarters in the military bunkhouse. Two pin-ups, of Raquel Welsh and Ursula Andress, were tacked up and immediately confiscated. There was high good humour and a growing sense of excitement.

The civilian workers, the farrier, traders, cooks, scouts and settlers from back east, occupied the second large bunkhouse. The eight girls were marshalled to their own dormitory by Miss Bevin. Two covered wagons, prairie schooners, covered in white canvas and drawn by heavy draught horses, arrived and were parked near the main gate. They would prove a focal attraction for future visitors.

It was late afternoon when Ben Craig reined in Rosebud half a mile away and studied the fort with a rising sense of alarm. The gates were wide open. Scouting from that distance, he could make out two prairie schooners parked inside and people crossing the parade ground. The flag of the Union fluttered from the pole above the gate. He made out two blue uniforms. He had waited weeks to be able to ask someone where the Cheyenne had gone or been taken, but now he was not so sure.

After deliberating for half an hour, he rode in. He came through the gate as two troopers were about to close it. They glanced at him curiously but said nothing. He dismounted and began to lead Rosebud to the stable. Halfway there he was intercepted.

Miss Charlotte Bevin was a nice person, good-natured and welcoming in the American way, blonde, earnest and wholesome with a freckled nose and a wide grin. She gave Ben Craig the latter.

‘Well, hallo there.’

It was too hot to be wearing a hat, so the scout bobbed his head.

‘Ma’am.’

‘Are you one of our party?’

As the professor’s assistant and herself a postgraduate student, she had been involved in the project from the outset and had been present at the numerous interviews leading to the final selection. But this young man she had never seen.

‘I guess so, ma’am,’ said the stranger.

‘You mean, you’d like to be?’

‘I suppose I do.’

‘Well, this is a bit irregular, you not being on the staff. But it’s getting late to spend the night on the prairie. We can offer you a bed for the night. So stable your horse and I’ll talk with Major Ingles. Would you come to the command post in half an hour?’

She crossed the parade ground to the command post and tapped on the door. The professor, in full uniform of a major of the Second, was at his desk immersed in administrative papers.

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