"Then I'll say both."
"Say both," Asa said. "That's all I'd ask of any man."
Klemm went away toward the hospital tent. Through the open flap, Iona saw him stop by Nalté's cot, where the scout sat up with his splinted arm across his knees, and stand there with his kepi in both hands like a man in church.
"I said you cut your own arm," Klemm said.
"You did."
"I'm—" The word got stuck somewhere behind the broken nose. He tried again and could not. His face went redder than ever.
"Finish it some other day," Nalté said. "I will still be here."
Asa asked Nalté, the next morning, what he wanted written in the report that would go to the department. The scout told him, and Asa wrote it down word for word. That the account was given by Nalté, of the White Mountain people of Cibecue Creek, and not by Scout B-14 or Sergeant's Jim. That the people of Cibecue had no part in any raid, and that the arrows and tracks were made by white men for money, and that this was to be read aloud to the scout company at Fort Apache by an officer, in English, and then by an interpreter in the people's own language, so that both sides heard the same words. And that Nalté would not sign a new enlistment until that had been done.
"They may not do it," Asa said, when he had finished writing.
"Then they will be short one scout," said Nalté. "And they will know why."
IX.
The general court-martial convened at Fort Apache in the second week of December, in a room with a stove that smoked and a window full of snow. Captain Asa Whitcombe, Sixth Cavalry, was charged with conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline, in that he did strike Corporal Otis Klemm in the face with his fist before enlisted men. He pleaded guilty. The court accepted the plea and then, because courts are courts, heard the witnesses anyway.
Lieutenant Ames read from the troop book in a voice that kept cracking. Steward Birch described the nose. Iona MacRae, called because she had been present, said what she had seen, and when the judge advocate asked whether the corporal's words had been offensive to her as a lady, she said that they had been offensive to her as a person, and the court-martial looked at her for a moment and then went on.