Then he waited.“You didn’t answer my question,” his brother-in-law pestered. “You still think we can overcome the animus, put this country back together … as one nation? You really think that, Rud? After all this?”“Yes,” Hayes said, looking at his pocket watch.“Well, then,” Doc Joe said, “Lucy ought to make you wear a dunce cap.” He stroked his horse’s neck, soothing the beast. “This country won’t be united in a hundred years. Too much killing, too much hate.”“Good men will repair it.”“The best men are dead.”“Thank you, Doctor, for that encouraging diagnosis. Joe, go on back to your surgery. You’ll be busy enough before long, and I’m busy now.”Joe smiled. “All right. But no tomfoolery. My sister wouldn’t make a kindly widow.”“Just git.”“Boils tolerable?”“You just git.”After Doc Joe turned his horse, Russ Hastings sidled up. The adjutant’s horse, Old Whitey, was admired throughout the brigade. “I thought we were going right in, sir?”“General Crook doesn’t want to go in headlong.”Neither man said anything about Kernstown, that hard-learned lesson.And yes, the boils were tolerable.
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