The Bugle Call

Summary

Beneath the brassy glare of a frontier sun, a boy’s grief marches in lockstep with his father’s sabre-rattle: Billy Andrews, all freckles and fortitude, stands sentinel over his mother’s memory while the flag snaps above adobe walls like a whip cracking open the sky. Into this crucible of dust and duty strides a luminous stranger—his father’s new bride—bearing lace gloves and a smile that smells of lilac water, yet cannot eclipse the scent of loam still clinging to the boy’s heart. Out on the horizon Lame Bear, chieftain of the Sioux, unfurls a stratagem as old as myth: draw the stallion away, then burn the stable. The garrison thins, the wind sharpens, and suddenly childhood is cancelled; the boy must shepherd a woman he refuses to love through a throat of moonlit stone, then climb a butte alone, bugle in fist, to counterfeit the thunder of returning cavalry. One brazen blast spills across the valley, a silver lie that routs painted warriors and rewires the circuitry of two orphaned souls: the widow who was never a mother, the son who feared he’d lost the right to call anyone that again.

Synopsis

Billy, who is the little son of Captain Andrews, commandant of a western army post, has one ambition in life, and that is to become a good soldier. This he has confided to his friend, Sergeant Hogan, and the sergeant takes pains to foster the idea. He really needs all his courage to face a new situation that has come up in his life. His father is going to marry again. While he knows absolutely nothing about his prospective stepmother, he can conceive of no one worthy of taking the place of his beloved mother, who lies in the little cemetery outside the fort. In spite of Billy, however, the wedding takes place. The newcomer tries in every way to win over the little fellow, but beyond politeness his friendship stops. Soon after the wedding his father is called at the head of his regiment to quell an uprising of the Sioux Indians, forty miles away. He leaves his bride in little Billy's care. The distant trouble is but a ruse on the part of Lame Bear, the Indian chief, and now, with his picked braves, he swoops down on the weakened garrison at the fort. The defenders of the fort are so few in number that it is but a question of time before they must surrender. Billy, bearing in mind the admonition of his father to take care of his stepmother, takes her away from the fort by a secret passage and hides her in a cave in the hills. Suddenly he observes the wavering men at the stockade. Bethinking himself of his bugle and hoping to lead the Indians to believe that his father and the regiment are returning, he blows the signal to charge from a distant knoll outside the fort. The outcome of that bugle call saves the garrison and draws Billy and his stepmother together.