Winter Rain
Page 1
Praise for the novels of Terry C. Johnston
CRY OF THE HAWK
“This novel has the epic sweep of the frontier built into it.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Will stain the reader with grease, blood, and smoke.”
—Kirkus Reviews
THE SON OF THE PLAINS TRILOGY
“Terry Johnston is the genuine article when it comes to storytelling, but you can also depend on his having done his historical homework. His Custer trilogy is proving this significant point, just as his Indian wars and mountain man books prove it. I admire his power and invention as a writer, but I admire his love and faith in history just as much.”
—Will Henry, author of From Where the Sun Now Stands
“[Johnston] has so immersed himself in the history of the Plains Indians and in Custer’s history that, were novels not his forte, he could very well write a book on Custer and his final battle to match that of … Evan Connell.”
—Dale L. Walker, Rocky Mountain News
CARRY THE WIND, BORDERLORDS, AND
ONE-EYED DREAM
“Johnston’s books are action-packed … a remarkably fine blend of arduous historical research and proficient use of language … lively, lusty, fascinating.”
—Gazette-Telegraph, Colorado Springs
“Rich and fascinating … There is a genuine flavor of the period and of the men who made it what it was.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Slick with survival-and-gore heroics and thick with Northwest-wilderness period detail (1820-40), this gutsy adventure-entertainment is also larded with just the right amounts of frontier sentiment.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Johnston offers memorable characters, a great deal of history and lore about the Indians and pioneers of the period, and a deep insight into human nature, Indian or white.”
—Booklist
BOOKS BY TERRY C. JOHNSTON
Cry of the Hawk
Winter Rain
Dream Catcher
Carry the Wind
Borderlords
One-Eyed Dream
Dance on the Wind
Buffalo Palace
Crack in the Sky
Ride the Moon Down
Death Rattle
Wind Walker
SONS OF THE PLAINS NOVELS
Long Winter Gone
Seize the Sky
Whisper of the Wolf
THE PLAINSMEN NOVELS
Sioux Dawn
Red Cloud’s Revenge
The Stalkers
Black Sun
Devil’s Backbone
Shadow Riders
Dying Thunder
Blood Song
Reap the Whirlwind
Trumpet on the Land
A Cold Day in Hell
Wolf Mountain Moon
Ashes of Heaven
Cries from the Earth
Lay the Mountains Low
for Jim Bourne
who helped point the way years ago,
with more gratitude than you
will ever know
How solemn and beautiful is the thought that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary—but always whiskey! … Westward the Jug of Empire takes its way!
—Mark Twain
The Texas Rangers … had an off and on existence ever since 1823, when Stephen F. Austin formed a band of ten Rangers to protect the first American settlements from Indians…. From that time on—throughout all their ups and downs, disappearances and reappearances—the Rangers were irregulars. They were irregular as hell, in everything except getting the job done.
—Oliver Knight
The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war.
—General William Tecumseh Sherman
Destiny is nothing more than the unforeseen coincidence of events, the emergence into action of hidden forces which, in a complex and disordered society … no contemporary can be expected to discern.
—Guglielmo Ferrero
CAST OF CHARACTERS
*Jonah Hook
*Hattie Hook
*Ezekiel Hook (Antelope)
*Prairie Night (Antelope’s Comanche wife)
*Gritta Hook
*Jeremiah Hook (Tall One)
*Shadrach Sweete
*Pipe Woman
*Toote Sweete / Shell Woman
*High-Backed Bull
Danites
*Colonel Jubilee Usher
*Heber Welch
*Frank Bolls
*Charlie Smythe
*Joseph Simes
*Oran Strickler
*George
*Orem Slade
*George Hines
*Harry Hampton
Cheyenne
Roman Nose
*Hair Rope
Little Hawk
Tall Bull
*Wolf Friend
*Plenty of Bull Meat
*Tall Sioux
*Bullet Proof
*Red Cherries
*Four Bulls Moon
Porcupine
*Wrinkled Wolf
Starving Elk
White Horse
*Bad Heart
*Yellow Nose
*White Man’s Ladder
*Feathered Bear
*Heavy Furred Wolf
Lakota
Pawnee Killer
* Bad Tongue
Kwahadi Comanche
Quanah Parker
*Wolf Walking Alone
*Snake Brother
*Coal Bear
*Bums Red
*Standing
*Rain Woman
*Bridge
*Big Mule
*Dives Backward
*Old Owl Man
*Tortoise Shell
*Four Spirits Woman
Shoshone / Snake
*Two Sleep
Military
Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie—commanding, Fourth Cavalry
Major Eugene A. Carr—commanding. Fifth Cavalry
Major William B. Royall—Fifth Cavalry
Texas Rangers
Major John B. Jones—Commander, Frontier Battalion
*Captain Lamar Lockhart—commanding Company C
*Deacon Elijah Johns—Lieutenant, Company C
*Niles Coffee—Sergeant, Company C
*Clyde Yoakam—Second Sergeant, Company C
*June Callicott
*John Corn
*Harley Pettis
*Wig Danville
*Enoch Harmony
*Slade Rule
*Billy Benton
Civilians
*Nate Deidecker
*Heber Usher
Major Frank North
Captain Luther North
Lieutenant Gustavus W. Becher
Lieutenant Billy Harvey
William Schmalsle
*Ezra Dickinson
William F. Cody
* fictional characters
Prologue
Late summer 1908
HE CAME AWAKE with a struggle.
The overwhelming enemies were musky in their sweat-slicked red skins. Their heaving breath stank like rancid meat in his nostrils. The muzzles of their guns exploded in his face like the roar of riven earth on Judgment Day.
Still, his was not the sort of thrashing, physical convulsion someone suddenly awakened from a sound sleep might fight.
No, his struggle was all within the dream.
And that frightened him even more.
Of a sudden he smelled the air.
Its sharp tang reminded him. With a start he knew where he was.
; Breath catching in his pounding chest, his hands grasped the edges of the grass-filled, tick-covered mattress beneath him in something close to relief.
As his head slowly plopped back against the pallet, Nathan Deidecker sighed and closed his eyes in emotional exhaustion, then drank in another breath of the cool, pungent air. Hungrily drank of the summer darkness outside.
Then realized why he had awakened.
Another low blat of thunder rumbled in off Cloud Peak rising thirteen thousand feet above the level of the sea out there in the blackness—not far off, its bellow slapped that high land in the deepest dark of postmidnight, the light of the heavens tracing down in tongues of fire just to the west of this small two-room cabin raised on a small promontory of ground by the back and shoulders and sheer will of the sinewy old scout.
Nate listened to another distant rumble, heard it coming almost serpentine across the heaving upvaulted land from a long way off, like it was some rock slide, a frightening avalanche careening down off the Big Horns toward him.
With the thunderous bellow fading onto the prairies below, the night stilled, and Deidecker marveled at just how clear and distinct and ominous sounds could seem out here in this country. Back east—hell, even back on the central plains of eastern Nebraska that he now called home—Nate could not recall ever really hearing any sound so distinct before.
As distinct as he now heard the whispers of this summer night.
Clear as rinsed crystal, he remembered the expression used by the old man just the day before when describing the property of light and sound and even how far a man might himself see in this immense, mind-numbing country.
“Damn right, Mr. Hook,” Nate mumbled to himself now. Some things were starting to come clear as rinsed crystal.
A creak of old rope crept past the thick wool blanket that hung as a crude door across the single opening between the cabin’s two small rooms.
Nate conjured a mental picture of the prairie bed: rough pine slats interlaced with hemp rope woven crosshatch to support its own grass-stuffed tick mattress.
Just someone stirring in their sleep, Nate thought. One of ’em awakened by the thunder like I was. Maybe that godforsaken green lightning—
As another distant, eerie flash backlit the Big Horns, there came another creak of the old rope, but louder this time. More stretch. And below that arose the muffle of voices. Whispered entreaties: low, husky, in need.
The green light’s eventual clap washed over the valley, and in its dying, Nate realized what was happening in the next room. Not without a little wonder.
“He’s … that old man’s making … making love to—” And he stopped whispering a moment, self-conscious at even the tiny sound his night voice made in that great silence of the thunder’s retreat. “…love to his woman.”
Deidecker sensed something rise in his throat, not sour nor choking like disgust at overhearing a bestial act. Not even fear of being discovered as an unwilling voyeur. Nothing closely resembling strong sentiment aroused by his own need of a woman to come into his life. No, what the newspaperman felt, lying there on that fragrant, landheady tick mattress dropped on Jonah Hook’s whipsawn wood floor, was something that filled Deidecker not only with immense happiness for the old scout, but with a profound sense of awe as well.
“That man’s too old to be climbing atop a woman,” he contented himself to say, rolling onto his side, away from the insistent, rhythmic creak of that rope-bed in the far room. “Especially that one … that … woman.”
Deidecker recalled just how dead she had been yesterday as he and the old scout talked of his early years come west to the prairies and mountains. She had been next to lifeless. Dead was the most apt word he could use to describe her, even wrote it down on some of the pages of his notes as Jonah Hook talked and Nate stole furtive glances at the old woman. He remembered now the way her pale blue eyes had gazed out at him without any light or the slightest fire behind them. As if Hook’s woman were a shattered hulk of some weakened building, those blue eyes like gaping, paneless windows, staring out at him with nothing but bleak, hollow emptiness inside.
Abruptly Nate shuddered, remembering how Jonah described his return to his homestead in Missouri after the war and his service on the high plains fighting Indians—coming home to find the cabin windows broken, the fields gone to weed. His whole family ripped from his life. The daughter. His two sons. And that woman.
To rid himself of the frightening specter of that doomed homestead, Nate shook his head like the old scout’s rangy yard hound shook its hide free of water as it clambered up the bank from the Little Piney River and forced himself to think on other things.
The newsman wondered, How’s a man like Hook ever able to get it up? Not that the frontiersman was so old he physically couldn’t. Not that at all. Just, how can a man desire a woman who clearly isn’t involved in what he’s doing with her at the moment? Her body might be in that room. But, Deidecker figured, her mind surely wasn’t.
What with the way she rocked and rocked, and rocked on all that previous day out on that porch in the shadow of Cloud Peak.
The grassy yard lit up with a sudden green flare of phosphorescent lightning tonguing down from the peaks in splintered streaks. Landing so close to the cabin, it raised the hair on his arms, at the back of his neck. Its looming brightness surprised him, and for a heartbeat the eerie, unearthly glow illuminated the large room as if by the purest, unsullied daylight. As it did, the old chromotype gleamed again with a life of its own, once more drawing him as the slap of thunder gurgled off the high granite, rumbling down the slope toward the cabin.
It was in the silence of last night’s first flush of darkness that Nate had looked at the browning tintype—awakened, then drawn by the reflection of the figures he studied with the moon shining in through the window right above his mattress.
Must be close to dawn, he thought without real calculation as the first huge, sopping wads of rain struck the porch roof like mud clods, so loud it startled Deidecker bolt upright from the tick. He shook like he was under fire from disembodied spirits out there among the ghostly green light and wind-tortured pines soughing in the sodden, thunderriven darkness.
Then in a crack of that great, gaping silence Nate heard the old man’s voice whispering, his pleas just barely audible.
By God, he’s romancing her, Deidecker thought as he listened more to the tone and the inflection of the words—not really able to hear all that Hook was saying to his wife. But the newsman, here to get the story of a lifetime on one of the frontier’s most famous scouts, did not have to hear every word to know that, as the old man rocked his body back and forth atop the woman, Jonah Hook was also murmuring to her as if she might truly be intent, really hanging on all that her husband had to profess to her.
And for the first time since Nate had come awake and begun listening to the old couple groaning and grappling in that near room, Deidecker of a sudden felt like he was no better than the man who knelt at a keyhole and peered in on the private, shabby lives of others, spying on their most intimate moments.
He rolled over again, stretching a hand into the dark, its fingers spidering across the rough floor until they captured his pipe and tobacco pouch. Deidecker roiled and found his feet, rose unsteadily, and padded barefoot to the door. Noiselessly he drew back into the room just as another flare of lightning, white-hot as brimstone, ripped into the yard, sundering the black night in two as he flung an arm over his face. Nate stood there, temporarily blinded until the light’s sting faded from his eyes.
He was left with only the reassuring slap of the familiar thunder come to caress both him and this wilderness in remembrance of that streak of fire quickly swallowed by the dark void of this short summer night here in the lap of this great, silent land.
It was only then that he realized he had been robbed of breath, shocked by the closeness of the lightning’s strike now. In awe at the very raw, killing power of it. Something so primal, so savage. Like arro
ws of fire stalking out of the great black dome of the heavens, flung down onto this wilderness.
As he stood there in the doorway, the sudden blast of the riven air assaulted his nostrils with the rank odor of the storm, not only permeating his heightened sense of smell, but seeming to penetrate every pore of his body. Barechested and shivering slightly, Deidecker stepped onto the porch, then stopped, warily cocking an ear back into the cabin as the thunder rumbled away, once more creating that eternal void of silence in its wake.
“I love you, Gritta,” the old scout vowed in a whisper like rawhide dragged over rough ground. “More now—than ever. And one day, I know you’ll come back from …”
As much as the newspaperman strained, he didn’t hear the rest of Hook’s plaintive words. Instead, the only sound from that blanket-doored room some twenty feet away was more of the fevered grappling in the dark.
Deidecker turned away to load his pipe, then struck a match, shielding it against the incessant breeze washing down from the peaks and the glaciers and that never-summer snow far above him in the darkness, where for that moment he wasn’t sure just what was sky and cloud, and what might truly be hulking mountain ready to tumble down upon this high land of awesome silence intertwined with the brooding black of wilderness night.
Then with his next sharp-tanged breath, the rain came hard upon that place.
And when it did, the breeze freshened like a cold slap against his bare cheek. He gasped in the sudden explosion of the summer-tanged ozone as the huge, wad-sized drops hurled themselves onto that crude porch, wetting his bare feet and soaking the bottoms of the canvas dungarees he had wisely purchased back in Omaha before journeying west to northern Wyoming.
Deidecker did not mind summer’s reeking, prairie cold, really. Nor the chilling, bone-numbing wet of the storm’s fury driven at him. Rather than fleeing, he instead settled there in the woman’s chair, puffing bowl after bowl of his favorite pipe, brooding on all the old man had spoken of just the day before, thinking on all that he wanted to ask Hook with the thunderous coming of this second day among the memories and the ghosts of years and lives gone the way of summer snows. His bare skin warmed with the closeness of those strikes of green, phosphorescent lightning, and his mind electrified with all the old man had already told him. Then he began to dwell on all the old man had kept from telling him.