Flight of the Hawk: The Plains

by W. Michael Gear

  FLIGHT OF THE HAWK: THE PLAINS

  A NOVEL OF THE AMERICAN WEST, BOOK 2

  FLIGHT OF THE HAWK: THE PLAINS

  W. MICHAEL GEAR

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, a Cengage Company

  Copyright © 2019 by W. Michael Gear

  Five Star Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Gear, W. Michael, author.

  Title: Flight of the hawk: the plains / W. Michael Gear.

  Description: First Edition. | Waterville, Maine : Five Star, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company, 2019. | Series: A novel of the American West ; book 2 | Identifiers: LCCN 2019000884 (print) | LCCN 2019002951 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432854096 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432854089 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432854072 (hardcover)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-5409-6

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Western stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3557.E19 (ebook) | LCC PS3557.E19 F55 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019000884

  First Edition. First Printing: June 2019

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-5409-6

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  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 23 22 21 20 19

  TO RICHARD S. WHEELER FOR BEING OUR BELOVED MENTOR IN THOSE EARLY DAYS.

  PROLOGUE

  Of all the possessions a human being claims, ultimately, only a person’s life and the demons that lurk down in the dark clefts of the soul are truly and ultimately theirs. Land, title, property, physical possessions, all will eventually pass on to others. All transitory.

  For a time, all that had been left for the man called John Tylor had been the demons. And then he had found the river and employment as an engagé, a hired boatman on Manuel Lisa’s 1812 expedition to the Upper Missouri.

  For the first time since John Tylor’s arrest, imprisonment, and escape, he had begun to once again cherish life.

  Back in Andrew Jackson’s holding cell, called “the pit,” Tylor had been chained in squalor, half starved, and savaged by rats. Death had been Tylor’s elusive hope. An earnest prayer. Especially after word reached him that his wife, Hallie, had divorced him.

  Charged with treason for his complicity in the Burr conspiracy, Tylor had managed to escape, had barely managed to elude capture in his desperate flight to St. Louis. To the Missouri River, and finally beyond the Upper Missouri frontier.

  After years of despair, self-imposed penance, and privation, he once again cherished life itself.

  As to the demons …?

  CHAPTER 1

  Under a star-shot sky, John Tylor slept in the folds of a woolen blanket. Night breezes danced out of the west, playing tenuously across the gently undulating grasslands. One moment they whispered through the bluestem, rustling the autumn-dry leaves, bobbing the heads now shorn of seeds. The next they stilled, allowing the songs of crickets, night birds, and the tremolo of distant buffalo wolves to be heard.

  In his blankets, sleep-lidded eyes flickering, Tylor’s dreams were haunted. The demons stirred, creeping up from their dark recesses. In flashes, Aaron Burr tormented him with an excited grin, saying, “John, the southwest is a fallow field. Ignored by Spain, it’s a paradise that needs only a firm hand to flower. An unclaimed empire that only needs to be seized.”

  Burr’s grin died, shifted, the vice president’s face thinned into Andrew Jackson’s. The general’s lips pulled thin, bitter with hate as those scorching eyes burned. “. . . Traitorous dog! A bullet’s too good for you, Tylor. I’d hang you myself . . . slowly . . . but for this warrant fromWashington City . . .”

  The dream faded, darkened, a scent of river caressing Tylor’s nose. His heart skipped as he heard, “Laddie, yer a debility.” Fenway McKeever’s thick Scottish brogue echoed in John Tylor’s nightmare. Those terrible green eyes with their merciless black pupils gave menace to the man’s freckled face. Close, hard, McKeever reached out with a callused hand. The fingers were closing, trying for a hold on Tylor’s throat.

  With a cry, Tylor jerked back. Turned. In blind panic he ran.

  All was blackness, a formless, shapeless void into which he fled. Heart hammering, he pounded on. Couldn’t see his hands as they clawed at the air, felt the breath tearing in and out of his lungs.

  But behind—ever closer in the stygian dark—the sound of McKeever’s heavy boots hammered with each massive stride. Tylor could feel their every impact through the hard ground. Closer, ever closer.

  The air stirred by his ear as McKeever reached out. In seconds that strong hand was going to clamp down and . . .

  “Damn, Tylor, wake up!” At the harsh voice, the dream shattered.

  A disruptive nudge to the hip brought Tylor fully awake in his blankets. He stared up at the night sky; familiar patterns of stars were black-blotched where clouds floated in silver silhouette.

  He lay on his back, the bed surprisingly comfortable where the blankets mashed down thick bluestem grass. A gentle west breeze rustled through the endless dry leaves and stems, nodding them in wavelike patterns that reminded a man of the ocean.

  To Tylor’s right, the horses stood, head down, hobbled, and apparently heedless of his night terrors. The dung fire in its pit was burned down to red coals.

  “Will Cunningham,” Tylor placed the voice. “We’re west of the Missouri. Three days’ ride out of Manuel Lisa’s camp on the river.”

  “ ’Tarnal hell,” Will Cunningham muttered. “I’s back with the missus. Just shucked my boots, shirt, and pants. Anna’s a laying there atop the sheets. Hot August night and all. Her hair down and spread all over the pillow. I drop to a knee, and just as she smiles up, and things start to get real interesting, ye cuts loose with a holler fit to shiver a bobcat.”

  “Sorry. Nightmare.”

  “Who’d a guessed?”

  Cunningham’s wife, Anna, was barely a year in the grave. Her loss was enough to cut the Kentucky hunter loose from any desire for the “civilized” lands of Illinois.

  As if an afterthought, Cunningham asked, “McKeever?”

  “Among others.”

  “You drowned him. Back in the river outside Manuel Lisa’s camp. The dead don’t matter no more.”

  Funny thing to say given that Cunningham had been about to make love to a deceased wife. Tylor—in a fit of good sense— figured it might be best if he avoided inserting that salient little detail into the conversation.

  “We’re beyond the frontier,” Tylor stated simply. “I should be feeling free. Instead, every time I close my eyes, it’s Fenway McKeever, Andrew Jackson, Joshua Gregg.” He fingered the dog-eared letter in the br
east pocket of his hunting shirt. “Or Hallie.”

  Tylor tossed his blanket to the side. He stood, staring around at the dark and gently rolling grassland. They were on the flat uplands, having climbed out of the incised trench of the Missouri River. It had been three days since they left the new trading post Manuel Lisa and his engagés were building on the river’s east bank twelve miles north of the Arikara villages.

  The new post would shelter Lisa’s 1812 fur trading expedition, provide a base for the Missouri Fur Company’s operations among the Upper Missouri tribes, and function as an outpost for the small trapping parties he would send out in search of furs.

  More than that, the post would serve as a reminder to the western tribes that America was a solid presence, unfettered by the war with Britain that was being fought in the east. Manuel Lisa lived among the river tribes as a representative of that nation in opposition to the Spanish and, worse, the British agents who now filtered through the villages and sought to turn the Arikara, Sioux, Mandan, and Hidatsa against the new nation.

  Convicted of treason against the United States, John Tylor wondered when he’d become such an ardent patriot.

  The night wind caressed Tylor’s thin face, flipping his long and unkempt hair. Manuel Lisa had once told Tylor that, upon first sight of him, Lisa’s impression had been of a totally brown man: brown eyes, hair, and tanned skin, his medium height clad in brown clothes. Nondescript.

  People wouldn’t remember the nondescript. Tylor had made a point of being exactly that sort of man.

  “Anything stirring out there?” Cunningham asked from his blankets.

  “Just the night wind.” Tylor lifted his hand, letting the breeze blow through his fingers. “Warm. Free.”

  He sniffed, drawing in the scent of grass: sweet and slightly tangy to his nostrils. “We’re going to have to make a choice come sunrise, Will. North to the Grand River or south to follow the Moreau River. Up here, on the divide like this? We’re going to be short on water.”

  “That’s the gamble,” Cunningham replied as he shifted in his blanket. “Grand or Moreau, it don’t matter. We follow one of the rivers west, we’ll hit one Indian camp after another. Thar’s just the two of us. And, let’s see. What trade did the booshway credit you with?”

  Like reciting the litany, Tylor said,“Twenty carrots of tobacco, twenty ceramic pipes, fifteen traps, five pounds of powder, and four of lead, ten knives, sack of gun flints, an ax, ten hanks of beads, three bolts of red cloth, three cards of needles, four tomahawks, three blankets, a sack of flour, and another of ground corn.”

  “And don’t forget the horses.”

  “And two horses,” Tylor amended. The Missouri Fur Company expedition clerk, John Luttig, hadn’t written the credit into the official ledger. That didn’t mean that Manuel Lisa ever forgot a debt.

  The horses lifted their heads, ears pricking, as something lurked out in the grass. Sniffing, the animals dismissed it, lowering their heads and exhaling. Whatever night creature, they found it nothing alarming. Tylor had learned early to trust a horse’s night sense far more than his own.

  “That wife of yours,” Cunningham said through a yawn, “you think you’ll ever get her back?”

  Tylor shifted, reaching into his worn shirt to finger the pages Hallie had written to him from a different world. “Some things are born, have their time, and die. And, Will, she’s not my wife. She divorced me. Married Joshua Gregg. That she could forgive me after what I did to her? The humiliation I caused her?” He chuckled hollowly. “What a remarkable and magnificent woman.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time in history that a man took back what was once his.”

  “Not this time, Will.” He looked out at the western horizon where patterns of stars vanished against the black horizon. “You see out there, just past the end of the grass?”

  “I’m asleep, Tylor. My eyes are closed.”

  “That’s my future. I’m going where no one knows me. Where no one will ever find out who I was or what I did.”

  “Can’t outrun your skin, coon.”

  “No. But in the end, one can seek to atone for one’s sins.”

  At least he hoped so.

  Assuming he had finally run so far that it was no longer worth the time or effort for his enemies to run him down. They would give up now, wouldn’t they?

  CHAPTER 2

  The mud that coated Fenway McKeever’s skin and ragged clothing had dried. It flaked and broke loose as he sat up. He coughed. Coughed some more. He’d been doing that for a couple of days now since pulling himself half-drowned from the river.

  How had destroying Manuel Lisa’s boats and killing John Tylor gone so wrong?

  He’d been more dead than alive that night. Dragged himself up on a sandbar. His fingers had clawed at the mud-rich sand, feeble as a dying kitten’s. He’d barely gotten his head out of the river. Had coughed gouts from his lungs, the liquid vanishing into the damp sand. Then he’d thrown up river water.

  Lying there, his chest, legs, and arms awash in the Missouri, he’d listened to the gurgling deep down in his lungs. And coughed and coughed until his throat had felt as if a splintered branch had been pulled through his windpipe.

  Some deep instinct, a reptilian presence, goaded him to crawl up, to battle his way across the trunk of an old cottonwood that had floated down and lodged on the beach. He’d flopped himself over the smooth wood, belly on the log, head and chest hanging, as water trickled out with each breath.

  How close to dead can a man be?

  Lying there, hanging like that, his cheek pressed into the sand, he’d tried to remember.

  That little shite, Tylor. Backstabbing bastard that he was.

  “Thought I had ’im in me hand,” Fenway muttered.

  Shook his head.

  Tylor was supposed to have cut the line that would set Manuel Lisa’s boat Polly loose on the current. Then they’d deal with the little boat. Adrift on the river, the boats would have grounded, holed their hulls, and sank. Any chance for Lisa’s expedition would have died in the Missouri’s silt-sanded depths.

  “And I’d have the key to the upper river in me hand,” Mc-Keever told himself.

  He blinked, thinking back to that night. To the whistling of the long pole as Tylor swung it. But for that hissing rush of air, the thing would have broken McKeever’s head open like a thin-shelled egg.

  He had chased Tylor all over the boat, roaring his anger. Only to have the little shite stick him in the thigh with a knife, then drag them both over the side an instant before McKeever could split the bastard’s skull open with an ax.

  From that moment on, McKeever would live with the memory of hitting cold water, of the blackness. And then, an instant before he finished the floundering Tylor, he’d been snagged from behind by that damn tree. The thing had fouled with McKeever’s clothing, lifting him, thrusting him down into the depths. One instant he was being raised high, the next he was driven down, the air crushed out of his lungs.

  McKeever rubbed his mud-encrusted eyelids. Swatted at the mosquitoes that hovered around him. Mud was a good thing. Mosquitoes couldn’t bite through mud.

  “Niver been so afraid in all me life,” he muttered.

  That had been days ago. Four? Five? He wasn’t sure.

  Didn’t care.

  What mattered was that he was alive. No way he could go back to Manuel Lisa’s expedition. Tylor would have told them everything.

  “So, laddie”—he stared out at the wind-chopped surface of the Missouri—“yer a going to head west into the Plains, aye? Think yer gonna just up and disappear? Not with two thousand dollars a ridin’ on yer head.”

  McKeever’s smile hardened. “And not after what ye done t’ me, laddie.”

  Thank the saints and angels above, Fenway McKeever remembered every word John Tylor had ever told him.

  He pulled himself up off the bank, then beat some of the drying mud off his torn and filthy clothing.

  Hiding next t
o the river during the day, sneaking close at night, he’d scouted Manuel Lisa’s camp where they worked to build the new fort.

  Tylor wasn’t there. Two of the horses were gone.

  That meant he was already headed west.

  Fenway McKeever no longer had a keg of salt to put Tylor’s head in. He wondered if just the man’s skull would be enough to collect the reward.

  CHAPTER 3

  Gray Bear sat on the high point, staring out at the rolling land. The afternoon sun beat down; tall and amber grass undulated like waves under the western wind. People had taken to calling him taikwahni, the Newe, or Shoshoni, term for chief. Being a chief had never been one of Gray Bear’s great driving desires. He had been happy to let his best friend, Three Feathers, serve as the leader.

  Now Three Feathers was dead, killed by the Blackfeet. The little band of fifteen Kuchendukani, or “buffalo eater” Shoshoni, were a couple of moons’ march east of their familiar territory on the western side of the Big Horn Mountains. Not really lost, just adrift in the endless sea of grass.

  Over his twenty-eight years, Gray Bear had grown to an average height, stocky of build, with muscular shoulders and arms. Bowed and bandy-legged, he had the rolling stride of a horseman when he walked. His amiable face, weather-blackened, had started to line from the effects of sun, snow, and wind. Like everyone in his small band, he’d hacked his hair short in mourning for the friends and kin killed by the Pa’kiani, the Blackfeet.

  That afternoon he sat on a low and crumbling outcrop of white clay where it protruded from the crest of a round-topped low ridge and allowed a view of the veinlike drainages that led down toward the cottonwood-and-willow-choked river a couple of hands’ ride to the north.

  No one they encountered so far into the grasslands could be considered a friend. The country where they now passed was itself contested, a no-man’s land between the Arikara, Mandan, Hidatsa, Sioux, Cheyenne, and occasionally the Arapaho, though they tended to stick to the west.